You are your choices and actions. You become your next choices and actions. Choose, do, become.
The meaning of the quote
What do I want? Who am I really? Don’t spend every Sunday afternoon with a journal, working through the same two questions on repeat. You will probably feel no closer to an answer than you did at breakfast. Self-awareness doesn’t sit at the bottom of a well, waiting to get pulled up through enough reflection. It gets built, one choice at a time, the way a wall gets built one brick at a time.
Jean-Paul Sartre made this the center of his philosophy. In “existence precedes essence” Sartre argued that a person has no fixed nature handed to them in advance. A knife has an essence before it exists, since a craftsman designs it to cut before it’s forged. This is not how it works for us humans. We show up in the world first, with nothing settled and only our choices carve out who we become.
Psychology backs this up. Daryl Bem’s self-perception theory found that people often work out how they feel by watching what they do, the same way a stranger would. Someone who keeps showing up to the 6am run doesn’t wait to feel like a runner before lacing up. They lace up, and the feeling catches up later, built from the evidence of their own behavior.
None of this makes reflection worthless. It means reflection alone can’t finish the job. The person on the Sunday afternoon with the journal isn’t wasting their time, they’re just missing the second half of the process. Write down what you want to be true about yourself, then choose the one action that would make it a little bit “truer”. The choice and the action do more work than the reflection.
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