How to Change Your Life
Why ideas are the real secret to personal change
World History is a story of ideas writ large. Ideas have toppled empires and world orders, birthing wonder and chaos. For millions, they describe utopia, and for millions more death, or Hell. An obscure German monk’s idea sparked the Protestant Reformation and veiled Europe in a century of war. More recently another German, this time a philosopher, laid the ideological groundwork that brought us close to Nuclear war and utter destruction. Less catastrophically, the entire edifice of science and technology, and our ideas of individual liberty, rests on the ideas conceived in the Enlightenment.
But ideas are fractal, with impacts at every level, from the societal to the personal. As they remake worlds, they remake our lives. The right idea at the right time can transform the way we see the world. A chronically failing dieter discovers the ethics of veganism and diet change comes effortlessly. An idea has its own momentum, a powerful current that sweeps us along. After an idea captures us, the frustrating battles with motivation dissolve away. Change becomes not only effortless but inevitable.
Ideas Are Involuntary
It’s a cliche that “ideas are like a virus”. Not only is it a cliche, but given the last 18 months, it’s an insensitive one. But it’s an apt analogy, which encapsulates a core truth. Christopher Nolan’s movie Inception restates this cliche in the most eloquent way I’ve heard:
An idea is like a virus, resilient, highly contagious. The smallest seed of an idea can grow. It can grow to define or destroy you.
In the film, the idea had to be planted deep in the subconscious, because you can’t force an idea. It’s presented to the world, vulnerable and powerful, and it either lands or it doesn’t. Their spread is, in essence, involuntary.
This involuntariness is key to taking advantage of ideas. The same idea delivered in the same way can be either life-changing or banal. When an idea captures us, there’s a healthy dose of serendipity. The time was right. A year earlier, or two years later, or a different messenger, and it might have drifted unrecognized through the boundless space of ideas, leaving our lives untouched.
The key point here is that you can’t choose whether an idea changes your life. It’s not an intellectual exercise, with a sober search for the best ideas and a deliberate attempt to believe it. The virus analogy is apt again here. Once you’re exposed you don’t choose to fall ill. Whether you do relates to some combination of the virus itself, the manner of your exposure, and your underlying susceptibility. Ideas work in a similar way, relying on some ineffable combination of many factors (personality, psychological state, life experience etc.), none of which we can control.
Idea Optionality
If you can’t control an idea’s impact, the one lever left to pull is exposure. The more ‘good’ ideas you’re exposed to, the more likely one takes root. You want to maximize idea optionality. The idea space is vast and varied and infinitely interesting, and with the Internet, it’s all accessible. The world’s best ideas are democratized. The digital ether holds countless seeds for change if you can find them. If you can find them.
Like a lot about the Internet, democratizing ideas is both a blessing and a curse. The best ideas are no longer geographically limited, or zealously guarded by exclusive institutions. That’s the blessing we already take for granted. But bad ideas, and mediocre ideas, and plain nonsensical ideas, propagate more freely too. We’re inundated with them, overwhelmed by them, with little way to discern between the good and the bad. Sieving the signal from the cacophony of noise is a battle the world seems to be losing.
So the simple suggestion to increase your exposure to good ideas is actually deceptively difficult. Our haphazard information ecosystem and its tangle of incentives work directly against that aim. An idea’s reach is driven by virality rather than quality. In the game of memes, good ideas — which are often caveated with nuance and exceptions — tend to lose.
For better and for worse, the fragmented media landscape is here to stay. Companies like Substack and technologies like blockchain will only fragment it further. Alongside fragmentation, the quantity of information available on the internet is growing exponentially. Global internet traffic increase nearly 100x in the last 10 years, and 1000x in the last 20 years. Cognizant of these emerging trends, we need to develop heuristics and principles to sort information.
When anyone can produce media and propagate ideas, trust is the guiding principle for navigating the quagmire. This is trust grudgingly given and easily lost, earned by consistent, quality content rather than by default. It results in curating a coterie of trusted media creators, which provide a selection of conflicting, varying views. Both curation and variation are vital here. Without variation, curation is inherently limited, silently constructing an echo chamber that narrows your exposure to a selection of the same, repeated ideas. It reduces idea optionality. But without curation, being exposed to ideas suddenly has a downside. A bad idea can lead you astray; you are fragile to them.
Ideas and Identity
Leveraging idea optionality is a superpower, but a limited one, more Marvel than DC. It works by altering our sense of identity. When we’re exposed to ideas and they resonate, we assimilate them. As they become part of us we identify with them, and we change our behaviour to match our new self-conception. Change here doesn’t need motivation, but our need to be consistent. The idea then is the trigger. It shakes our identity, and from this earthquake change flows.
This is an unconventional story of changing your life. It highlights the vagaries of chance behind the tales of personal responsibility and hard work. It reveals the unquantifiable je ne sais quoi behind every success story, unrecognised because we can’t imagine history turning out differently. You need hard work too, of course. But before that, the spark at the Big Bang is a glorious, powerful, dangerous idea.
