How can I bridge the gap between the person I am and the person I want to be? First, and foremost, you have to care. I don't mean care a little, or at least enough to ask the question, or care about someone else enough to sort of want to be a better person. I mean you have to make it one of your top three priorities, something you do when it's hard, when there's a cost, when your career or a relationship that you value is on the line. More important than your job, your social status, how much money you make, and maybe even the people close to you. Until you care enough to make becoming who you were meant to be a priority, you'll never make the decisions that you need to. Then, you have to define who you want to be. Not generally but specifically. You are essentially designing your future self. Design is about strategy but it's also about details - the hue, the mathematical angles, how it looks from far away, how it looks up close, how all sorts of people interact with it. In the same way, you need to figure out the strategy - your values, your principles, your tradeoffs - but you also need to figure out the details - who you will spend time with, what language you will use, what you will put up with, whether you will wake up early every day, where you will live, how stable your life will be, how you will build relationships with people, how you will decorate your house so it's a place that fits you. Paint that vision with a high degree of fidelity, from the ground up. Next, you need to learn about the gap between who you are now and who you want to be. This is harder, because most people create mental constructs to make their experience of life feel better - constructs about how awesome they are, how honest they are, how great of a driver they are, how they are something special. You are something special but your confidence in it needs to come from an intrinsic place, a place that needs no validation to stay upright. Otherwise, it'll always be fragile. Break down those mental constructs and ask yourself: Relative to the person you want to be, what do you suck at? Write it down. Finally, you have to close the gap. This is a marathon, not a sprint. You have to wake up every day and do your damndest to BE that person, when you're having your coffee, or chatting with your colleague, or doing your expenses, or ragingly angry, or listless and sad, or feeling like you have no one to talk to. You will fail yourself often but that's part of the process. Learn from those failures. Make decisions - hard decisions with real costs behind them. Take risks, and embrace the fear-pain of them as part of living. Invest in yourself - take the time to learn the things you always wanted to know, wear clothes that make you feel like yourself, create an environment around you that helps you be your best self, spend time alone and thinking without distraction. Distance yourself from the people in your life that drag you down, and build real rock-solid relationships with people who make you amazing.
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