Anyone who has spent time in the self help space will have inevitably heard about identity—namely, using identity as a means to become the person you wish to be by putting yourself in the mindset of that identity. A much less discussed point about identity, I find, is looking at who you currently are, rather than who you wish to become. Who are you at your core? You might not realize it, but your actions, environment, and all the decisions you make serve as a way to reinforce who you already are. There’s one particular aspect I’d like to discuss in this post, and that’s uncovering the type of person you didn’t know you were.
Starters vs Finishers
Are you a person who starts things? What about a person who finishes things? Notice how these are two distinctly different identities. If you’re anything like me, as time goes on and your interests shift from one thing to the next, you inevitably accrue a backlog of unfinished things that never seems to go down. That show you started watching but never finished; that book you read two chapters of before putting it back on the bookshelf; that skill you promised yourself you’d learn in your free time, only to end up doom scrolling during your scheduled learning sessions instead. It’s my belief that this backlog plays a larger role in your identity than you realize, in more ways than one.
Impacts of Unfinished Tasks
To start, let’s discuss the Zeigarnik Effect. When you’re interrupted from finishing an activity or task you’ve been working on, your brain remembers that it’s incomplete. These unfinished activities are easier to recall than those which you’ve sufficiently completed. Basically, the more incomplete and unfinished tasks you have, the greater your background cognitive load is. Without knowing why you’re overburdened by all of these tasks, it can be easy to blame yourself for not working hard enough, or wonder why you’re not capable of doing as much as others appear to be.
More than that, however, I have reason to believe that this shapes identity, as well as behavior. Imagine, if you will, that you made a list of all the things you could recall not finishing. Be that books, shows, games, courses, skills, plans, projects, or anything else. Before long, you’ll realize that you could make a looong list. The logic then follows that since you’ve built up this backlog of unfinished things, you’ve casted a long list of votes towards being the kind of person who starts things, but doesn’t finish them.
Redefine Your Thinking
We don’t often think of it this way, and of course, why would we? Maybe you fell out of love with learning the guitar, or you realized you don’t currently have a use for that language you wanted to learn, or the book you started reading really wasn’t that interesting. Regardless of that, I posit that the very act of quitting before the finish line is what has made this sense of being unable to do things so prominent in many of us.
What of all the things you have finished? Surely that would swing the ballot the other way around, right? Recall the Zeigarnik Effect from earlier. The basic idea of the effect is that memories of incomplete tasks are much more readily available for recollection than memories of those that have been deemed complete. What this means in practice is that everything you’ve completed up ’til now means a lot less to your subconscious and your identity than everything you’ve yet to complete. Perhaps you can start to see how it’s far easier to have self doubt about doing things as opposed to confidence.
Building Yourself Up
What do you think would happen if you went back and finished one of those things? Two of them? Three, four, five of them? Not just complete them, but celebrate the success and make a record of having finished it. Slowly, over time, you start to shift the scales in your favor. Gradually, you build up a series of votes towards being the kind of person who is capable of doing the things they set out to do. In the long run, this grants you the ability to take on new things you wouldn’t have imagined doing before, because you start to see that the end goal is actually within reach. In reality, it has been within reach this whole time, you simply weren’t capable of seeing your way through to it.
I realize there will be some things you have no interest in completing, and that’s perfectly okay. Put it on your list anyway, and physically cross it off as a way to signal to your brain that it’s behind you now. Other tasks don’t have such an easily defined end point, like learning a skill. It’s up to you to find where your mind deems it a success. For learning a language, perhaps that means becoming conversationally fluent, but not necessarily full proficiency or the ability to write in it. On that point, however, I’d suggest starting out with the things you can very easily finish, like getting through the remaining 50 pages of a book or the last few hours of a game you’re close to finishing. Get the ball rolling with the easy stuff, and before long you’ll find it fun to cross off more and more tasks. You’ll clear out the backlog and reduce the background cognitive load you didn’t know they were taking. More than anything, you’ll start to realize that you truly can just do things.
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