Essay 27 - Do You Know Who You Are? (Conceptual Level) 

Are you a friendly person? Do you care about other people? Are you ambitious? How about goal oriented? We could fill the page with questions like we did in the previous essay but that would get tedious. Instead let’s drill down a bit on these few questions.

Let us say you believe you are a friendly person. Do you have any evidence? If you do, is there evidence to the contrary? How does the evidence of being friendly balance against the counter evidence or counterexamples?

Let us take goal oriented next. If you say you’re not goal oriented, does that mean there is nothing you aspired to do? If you think you are goal oriented, have you articulated your goals? Have you written them down? Do you track your progress?

If you have no evidence to support what kind of person you are, then maybe that is an illusion as well. So, let’s try to come at this from another perspective.

If you gave me a list of characteristics that you felt defined you and I asked your friends to describe you on each of these characteristics, how would that turn out? Would they agree with you or present a different picture? Would they agree with each other?

And what does each of these possibilities mean? If you see yourself differently, are you deluded, or have you misrepresented yourself to your friends? If different friends see you differently, does that mean that you present yourself differently to different people? If so, is that OK? If your friends all see you the same way, and it agrees with who you think you are, maybe you just aren’t that interesting. There are many ways to look at this and each will reveal more about who you are as a person.

This essay is 309 words long and the audio is just over 2 1/2 minutes.