You are never who you think you are. And that is the most liberating thing that you could ever realize.

In the West, there is an idea that is related to personal identity that completely misunderstands what it means to be perfect or what it means to grow.

This is an important key to understand, whether you’re an entrepreneur or simply someone who is trying to be human.

Progress is always meant to be dynamic. Change is always meant to be changing. However, we are conditioned to think that the more someone is: “themselves“…the more we should celebrate them.

We have been made to believe and accept that individuality IS a phenomenon directly related to focusing on what makes us different. The more we are conditioned To the specific behaviors, the more we fail to realize that others are being conditioned to do the same.

So, then individuality in and of itself isn’t really a social phenomena, it’s just simply a whole bunch of people trying to be different, ironically being the same doing just that.

Without becoming uselessly philosophical here, neuroscience and the research that is related to it has emerged to show that memory; as in the memories we access throughout our life, when accessed are never the same.

So, if you remember something that happened to you as a child, whether it be good or bad, your memory is never accessing the truth of what happened. Neuroscience is now showing that every single individual time we access a memory, something changes in it.

Why is it important that we understand the nature of memory as it relates to identity and individuality? Mainly, more to the point, is that our sense of identity or individuality is a composite of all of our memories. And if that is always changing, then we ourselves will also always be changing.

The new hero should not be the one who sticks to their guns, but the one who realizes that they need to change in the face of uncertain circumstances.

This goes not just for the individual, but even the marketplace, That if we were to apply the truth from neuroscience to society, that the only way we could fully grow is to absolve the need to try to constantly cohere meaning out of our history. We must give up hope on history-to build a future without it.

I know this seems counterintuitive, especially since as young children we are taught to trust what we read about history.

But, if memories are simply another form of history, and neuroscience is saying we can’t truly ever access history, then history will impede us from ever moving forward if we hold onto it so tightly.

This is true whether a nation holds onto its history as identity, or whether we hold onto our own personal history as identity.

So, the next step would be to audit your own history. Audit your own very personal identity and where you are now, and what beliefs, habits, and things have you adopted to try to present a whole self? And realize that to embrace change, is to embrace the reality that we are splintered versions of ourselves all of the time.

And that splintering, is ironically where all of the creativity in the light comes in. So rather than run from it, we need to re-wire the way we have come to know and understand ourselves.

Again, this can be applied to ourselves individually, companies, our communities, to our friends, and even to our nation.

What are your thoughts on this? Share below.