Claim the Identity and the Habit Follows

You’ve probably noticed this without ever naming it. We know people who runs regularly doesn’t usually say “I’ve been trying to go on runs.” They say, almost without thinking about it, “I’m a runner.” But that one friend who’s still working up to it says the opposite making it not a claim but just a report. “I’ve been trying to run more.” One sentence describes a person. The other describes an effort someone is still auditioning for.

It sounds like a small difference in grammar. I don’t think it is.

I used to think the gap between those two sentences was just about progress and that the runner earned the noun through enough miles, and the other person simply hadn’t put in the time and effort yet. But that’s backwards, and the more I sat with it, the more backwards it seemed. The identity usually comes first where people don’t become runners and then start calling themselves that. They start calling themselves that, sometimes embarrassingly early, and the running follows the claim more often than the claim follows the running.

There’s a study I keep coming back to, from a group of Stanford researchers who wanted to know if language alone could move people toward something they’d normally need discipline for. They took a group of eligible voters and split them in two. One group got asked how important they thought it was to vote. The other group got asked how important it was to be a voter. Same idea but a different noun. In the actual election that followed, the group asked about being a voter turned out at a noticeably higher rate than the group asked about voting opening a gap wide enough that it wasn’t explainable by chance. Nothing else about their lives had changed. Just the word.

Nobody talked them into it. Nobody gave them a reason. Somebody just handed them a version of themselves to live up to.

What strikes me most about that study isn’t really the voting part. It’s what it implies about every other place identity quietly does this same work, mostly without anyone noticing it’s happening.

Take something as ordinary as sugar. “I can’t eat sugar” and “I don’t eat sugar” describe the exact same behavior, but they come from two completely different places. The first is a rule somebody else installed may it be a doctor, a diet, our own guilt standing over us with a clipboard. Every time we say it, you’re negotiating with a restriction, and negotiations can always be lost on a bad enough day. The second one isn’t a restriction at all. It’s just a description of a person, and that person happens to be us. Nobody negotiates with who they already are.

It shows up in smaller, sillier places too. “I’m trying to be a morning person” is a sentence said by someone still deciding whether to get out of bed. “I get up early” is said by someone who already has, enough times that the sentence stopped being a hope and became a fact they’re reporting. Same 6am. Completely different relationship to it.

Willpower spends energy fighting a version of yourself that still wants the opposite thing. Every time you rely on it, some part of you is arguing against the very action you're trying to take, which is exhausting in a way that has nothing to do with the difficulty of the action itself. Identity doesn't fight anything when there's nothing left to argue with once the action is just what someone like you does. That's the entire difference. Not more discipline. Less internal disagreement to begin with.

This raises the obvious next question which is not whether this works, but where the sentence actually comes from in the first place. Because if identity really is doing all this quiet work, there's a mechanism underneath it that explains why, and once you see it, it stops being a language trick and starts being something you can actually use.