Epic Quest progress report: Today is day 16. Total word count: 6075 words.

We build habits to show ourselves who we are.

We tell ourselves we do it for all kinds of reasons: to make ourselves better, to get healthy, to model right behaviors for our family. Maybe to show those bastards who they’re really dealing with.

We say it’s all for them. But it’s really for us.

Don’t believe me? Think about a bad habit. Why did you let yourself fall into it?

It wasn’t intentional. You never made the decision to eat sweets every day for twenty years, or to sit on the couch and flip on the TV every evening, or to pour a second glass of wine when you sit down for supper, or to smoke a cigarette every time you get in the car. You never said to yourself, I want this habit to be how I present myself to the world.

But today, now that it’s a habit, what do you tell yourself?

It’s not my fault, you say. I’m the kind of person who does this. It’s just part of who I am. And if the world doesn’t like it, it can kiss my….

You can fill in the rest of that sentence just fine, I imagine.

The habit is how you show yourself who you are. You justify it to the world, then use it to identify yourself.

What if you chose a different approach?

Because even though it was never a choice to fall into a bad habit, it was a choice to sit on the couch and turn on the TV. Every day, it was a choice.

And it’s within your power to make a different choice.

And when you make that choice, you can tell yourself: This is who I am. I’m the kind of person who does this.

You might not believe it at first. You might have to argue with yourself. Tell yourself I’m the type of person who works out on the way home from work, and your old habits might come back at you with no, I’m the type of person who goes home and cracks open a beer and turns to whatever game is on that evening.

And in that moment, you get to make a choice. Which of those types do you want to be? Which do you want to see when you look in the mirror afterwards?

The answer might not be the same every day. It’s almost certain that some days you will choose to go home and watch the game. None of us is always the person we aspire to be.

And sometimes we aspire to too much. You probably can’t play in the NBA, and I probably can’t write the next Game of Thrones. But you can choose to be the type of person who works out every day, and I can choose to be the type of person who writes every day.

So make it a choice. Show yourself who you really want to be. And choose to become that.

You might just discover you’re more than you ever thought you were.