Your alter ego
A light reflection on 2023 and a framework for 2024
I’ve written previously about the power of selecting an identity (below) and living your life in the shoes of that identity, and as I start to think about 2024, the topic comes back to the front of my mind thanks to an exercise I’ve been doing.
While aimlessly browsing Twitter (as one does) I saw this awesome Personal annual planning template by Grace Clarke (Not Grace Thieme, although you can find her newsletter here).
It’s a Google Slides template that you fill out over four days for about an hour each day, and I’ve found it to be especially useful in planning my life for this year, even though it’s the first year I’ve used it.
Here are the four days from a high-level, but I’d encourage you to check out the template itself:
Day 1: Review the last year
Day 2: Visualize the best - BEST - next year
Day 3: Focus your vision into specific goals
Step 4: Make a plan
My first reaction to this was “ok this seems a bit excessive” but the maximalist in me was intrigued.
There are some slides that are a little "crystal-collectory” at first glance – such as a section on moodboarding your ideal relationship with yourself – and while I’ve always known that moodboards can be helpful in my own design work, I’ve felt like moodboarding one’s life was a bit of a weird exercise.
But I will admit, the visualization has been… surprisingly powerful.
Having images to refer to when you’re living out your identities in the various categories of life provides a commitment you made to yourself to behave or think of yourself a certain way. Photos collected and put under the title of “my ideal life” have made for a new motivation that has caught me by surprise.
The most powerful exercise so far has been on describing what feels like the highest version of myself.
Defining your alter ego
I mentioned in my previous writing the high-level idea of identities, but this exercise seems to aggregate the concept into one idealized version of yourself with a page committed to your alter ego. Take all of your identities of what you aspire to be and put them in front of you in a single place.
After completing this exercise – without even really thinking about it directly – I have caught myself adjusting my behavior to act more like what my “alter ego” would do.
Especially for the morning and evening routines (the third row down). Whereas in the past I may waffle and choose to watch YouTube or mindlessly browse social apps, I stop to think ok well would my alter ego do that? No, they would stick with the system, get it done, and move on (either to bed, or to get on with my day).
The most impactful part of having this character in my head has been defaulting to “let’s try to get it done today because I believe I can do it for myself” rather than defaulting to an excuse like “well we don’t have a ton of time so may as well put that off until tomorrow.” I’ve found that by simply having an idealized version of myself, I’m able to measure my actions against that expectation of myself.
For a long time I’ve felt like a lot of my motivation comes from avoiding disappointing people I respect but I haven’t quite found a mechanism that has worked without the social pressure of other people.
This exercise has felt like setting my own social expectation for… myself. Which seems bizarrely freeing and accountable in its own way.
It makes total sense of course, why wouldn’t you want to hold yourself to the highest standard of what you’d like to achieve? I didn’t think that actually taking the time and effort to both visualize and codify what my ideal self would be would start producing subtle results so soon.
Modesty in your highest self
One thing that I found interesting about the exercise was how on first pass I felt like I needed to be modest with what I was looking to do. I toned down the words and vision I had to feel more achievable and quieter than what I’d like.
I started to realize in doing so that I forgot the value of targeting for something bold and ambitious. It doesn’t matter how grand your ideas are to other people – but the ambition of those ideas may actually be fruitful for your own personal decision making. “Shoot for the Moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars” so they say.
The exercise itself has taken quite a few hours to work on, and admittedly I still have to finish the last section on goals, but I have already seen a shift in my own behavior and the time commitment has felt well worth the effort.
A lot of times I may sit and journal with no end or objective in sight, telling myself that by getting it out on paper I may yield some result. But the reflections I’ve made while working with this system have had quite a strong impact already, and I’m excited to have something to look forward to revisiting every quarter, and then repeating for next year.
Doing more in 2024
I was originally going to write an analysis on the past year, but as I was going through each month and writing down lessons I learned, I felt that so much of the year was insubstantial. I couldn’t find key takeaways that really stood out from my experience that I felt were worth synthesizing in a post.
I’m fortunate to have gotten to travel quite a bit (and I should probably put that experience into words sooner rather than later), and I did move from LA to NYC, but so much of the vast amount of space in the year felt almost reclusive in nature.
I’m sure many of you would say the past year was a year of introspection and personal growth if you read the key moments I recorded as part of my 2023 recap, but even so I felt that last year was especially transitory.
It wasn’t a necessarily bad year, but it wasn’t one that I felt I had exercised much agency in. There were so many moments that I felt I did not have the momentum or drive or ability or skills to pursue. I felt like I had too many opportunities and not enough urgency or need to make a decision towards any of them.
In short – I didn’t feel like I did very much to point back to.
After all, what you do is who you are, so combining my reflections on 2023 with the exercise of planning my 2024, I’m making sure that I create more outputs this year.
It is advice that my alter ego and I will be taking into 2024, and I hope it’ll inspire you as well as you think about who you’re going to become by this time next year.
Some posts that may be helpful as you gear up for 2024:
