Know thyself
Read time: 10 minutes
Who are you?
Do you even know what that means anymore?
Do you even have a clue how to actually begin to describe yourself so that others “get you”?
I know I have found it extremely hard for the longest part of my life, so I would like to share what I know so far.
What does knowing yourself even mean?
What the actual fuck does “knowing yourself” even mean?
In all honesty, I have no clue whatsoever.
My best guess is that knowing yourself means being aware and attuned to who you know you are intuitively, deep into your guts.
To know yourself means first of all that you know what influences you, that you know what you predisposed to, what you care about, what you like, what you do not like, what you can handle and what you refuse to accept.
Mainstream media so stupidly directs us towards the act of “just being yourself”.
That is purely impossible to do before we KNOW who we are.
There is simply no right or wrong answer to that question.
There is no wrong time to ask yourself this.
It is never too early or too late to do so.
There are plenty of ways of approaching the question.
There are a ton of answers to be given, yet before we even start asking ourselves WHO THE FUCK AM I, we might want to learn about…
Why is it important to know yourself?
Why do I even need to fucking bother?
In all honesty… You do not.
Plenty of people live pretty happy and normal fulfilled human lives without ever knowing themselves.
That is definitely NOT to say that you have nothing to earn by learning about yourself.
First up, knowing makes you… YOU.
It will give you clarity on where you are now and where you want to be heading.
Can you go through life without understanding your personal story?
Sure, you can, but there is much more to life once we start unpacking this lifetime project called “I”.
Secondly, you can avoid a lot of suffering.
If you know you hate particular activities, ideologies, groups of people, you could save yourself a lot of pain and hurt along life by merely not associating ourselves with that.
Thirdly, we can save a lot of time.
Investing a few hours (be it 3 hours, or 2 years) will greatly affect the activities that you get into in order to arrive where you want to arrive.
It will show you what you are good at and where you need help.
You will gently guide yourself towards the path that gets you use your resources in the best way.
Lastly, you can take charge of your own life.
It is much better to know what makes us tick, than to be a pebble in the flow of the river.
If you have the knowledge on how to make yourself do the uncomfortable thing, on how to get yourself to have fun, on what greatly impacts you, you start being in charge of your own fucking life.
So then… How do we begin?
Where to next?
There is quite a lot of things that go into getting to know yourself.
There is no one size fits all recipe that will guarantee that you will be set for life, that you will know everything there is to know about yourself.
I am going to at the very least try to give you a few directions where you can head towards from here:
1. Journaling
There is so much to learn by merely talking to yourself and being attentive.
Journaling openly to yourself about yourself and your life has a ton of benefits, among which is the fact that you can recollect how you felt, thought and saw things at a point in time.
Every night for a few minutes take a pen & paper, digital screen or whatever your preferred writing method is and just note down whatever you have to share with yourself.
Every few months (once every 2 to 3 months) revisit your journal entries and you will be surprised to see how much there is to go through.
After a few months of writing, you will have enough data to actually see patterns, to identify when you feel in a particular way and why, to predict your own behavior.
The important thing to take home is that in order to journal, you need complete honesty to yourself about yourself and you need a system set in stone that will make sure you actually write every day, that you will review your writing once every few months and that you will act on your results.
2. Values
Values are quite a big topic to cover.
Values can mean many things for different people.
For me, values are the filters by which we live our lives.
Values are words or phrases that completely define an area that we highly value.
To get an idea about how I set my own values, here is my own list:
Empowerment – Knowing and proving that I can do anything and everything I want enough and devote enough resources to.
Insight – To know everything there is to know about something, to understand not only how it works, but WHY it works, to see the trends of life, to have the inside knowledge, to “get it”
Sensation – To feel EVERYTHING (not only happiness, but also, sadness, love, depression, sorrow, cluelessness). To be alive, open and aware. To be a mountain against a river, yet a river in of itself, to appreciate the beautiful even though it has no other value.
Intentionality - - To be present and fully in control of myself, my decisions, my body, my mind, my life. Not to do stuff because you are “supposed to”, but rather because I CHOOSE TO.
Amor Fati – - To be entirely accepting of my fate, of the place I am now in my own story. To never want to be anywhere and anytime else but here & now. To be content in life.
I would advise you have between 3 and 5 values, words that would best describe what it is that you look for in life.
This is a big one, so take a longer period of time to ACTUALLY think about it.
Write down everything that you feel makes sense.
Take 2 weeks to a month to really deeply think about these things and after that formulate your values.
Your values may change over time, but there is no usefulness in updating your values once every Friday.
CHOOSE your values after an informed journey into who you care to be, set them and run with them for a few months!
The important thing to take home is that there are no wrong values.
These are YOUR choices to make.
The only wrong values for you are the ones that are not congruent with you.
This is an exercise about yourself for yourself.
Fuck what other people want for your and from you.
This is about you.
Your values are YOURS and YOURS ALONE.
3. Tests
There are definitely more tests than I can cover in a mere article.
I will just leave a few suggestions I got a lot of value from:
Big 5 - https://openpsychometrics.org/tests/IPIP-BFFM/
DISC personality test - https://www.123test.com/disc-personality-test/
Myers Briggs - https://www.16personalities.com/free-personality-test
Schwartz values - https://www.123test.com/work-values-test/
The four tendencies - https://quiz.gretchenrubin.com/
4. Describing yourself
More than anything, the thing people will remember you for whenever you introduce yourself is the answer to the question “what do you do?”.
That answer does NOT define who you are.
It is merely the first way for others to understand who you are.
There are plenty of ways to describe “what you do”, but I like to approach this in 3 ways:
The now: That is an easy one, you might say.
The answer to the question “what do I do” is my job title.
And to that, my friends, I’d say extremely… WRONG.
We are not merely defined by what we do in those 8 hours.
We are not defined by a job title.
We define ourselves by what we actively do.
We create our descriptions by the verbs we choose to practice in your daily lives.
If you sit all day at home and you play games, you are a gamer.
If you run, you are a runner.
If you paint, you are a painter.
If you write, you are a writer.
Our identity is not created once we have done something great, but rather our identity changes according to the verbs we choose to practice in our daily existence.
The near future: How would you like people to get to know you?
When 2 people have a conversation, they say “I know a guy” and they reference you, what do you want the question to be?
“Do you know a great programmer?”
“Do you know any great psychologists?”
“Do you know anyone who creates amazing stories?”
That’s closer to a job title, but you may also express who you are as:
“A great team player”
“Someone who builds amazing organizational cultures”
“A cool story teller”
The lifetime: What is that one audacious thing you are working on for the long term (as long as you can think of) that would get people to say “wow, I want to be part of that”?
This is a pretty tough one.
You don’t need to know it yet, you don’t need to think for longer than 5-10 years, although it would be great if you could go for a much longer view.
Consider this to be an optional.
Make sure you have everything above done before you even begin to tackle this question.
Remember: You choose how you describe yourself and how you get others to describe you.
You are an ever-changing being.
Getting to know yourself is a journey of a lifetime.
Never get discouraged and always remember everyone is just as clueless.
People give their whole lives to studying a very little thing in a very specific field.
Studying yourself is one of the hardest and the proudest research journeys you will ever have.
You are both the most unique and just as common as any human.
You are a living paradox of existence.
Don’t forget not to get too attached to how you define yourself and don’t get yourself that serious.
Also… Screw who you are every once in a while and just go wild!