What you do when you’re alone says a lot about who you are.

Those are the moments when you aren’t beholden to anyone or anything. No rules. No guidelines. No rails.

When I leave my children alone (basically whenever I go upstairs do chores), they let loose to be their “best selves”. The longer it takes me to complete my objectives, the more they tend to exert their influence over their surroundings.

This usually leads me to end up cleaning a huge mess that even the dogs are like “dude, we didn’t have anything to do with it.”

Whatever it is that you are powered by and motivated by come out the clearest when you are not bound by external limitations. I’m not saying that you should just regress to a toddler mindset and let your most basic impulses dictate your actions (at least not all the time). The point is to begin developing a set of internalized systems and functions that enable you to be fully aligned with this unencumbered state.

Your identity, the external one, is the shell around the real you.

It’s a rather large area to cover, so I asked for help from the most powerful technology we have now…

I decided to ask AI for help on getting me started into the syntopical approach of expanding my knowledge. If you’ve read my work for a significant period of time, then you know that I’ve been exploring my own thoughts and perspectives without really having any external inputs.

Here’s my prompt:

“I'd like to have a list of suggested reading to get my head around the philosophical and psychological aspects of identity so that I may better articulate my position in why I believe that an internally, value-centric perspective on it is the best way to avoid being easily influenced by external factors. Can you help me in this and map it to my "digitally decoupled" pillars?”

This is how I choose to use it — to provide guidance and suggestions rather than offloading my thinking. What would’ve taken me a few days or weeks to search for across different sources on the internet and in the library, I used it to give me an overview based on what I’m building here.

The short response that it provided was to explore the following authors:

The lineup is from across the spectrum in discipline, focus, and depth. It also leaves the legwork up to me to explore, and this is no small feat.

Feel free to try it for yourself! I’ll be updating to let you know what I find. If you want the full response, let me know. I’m planning on putting it in my Skool community that I’m working on…along with the reference to the following exercise.

I discussed this exercise in another piece I wrote three years ago when I first started digging into value-based identity, In fact, it’s one of those exercises that can be used periodically to check and update. People change and grow, and the values that they espouse shift and evolve because different stages of life have different priorities. Tapping into your self-awareness enables you to draw a bead on this process.

I reviewed mine (definitely needed an update), and the main five that I selected are still relevant, if not more so.

Here’s my response:

I am family and community-oriented, dedicated to improving myself physically, emotionally, and mentally. I do it to consistently contribute to society in a way that is inclusive, productive, and meaningful. This drive includes both the real world and the digital one, and I aspire to show others how to expand both.

No labels. No “I’m a 9-5 parent/father/engineer/writer/content creator…” I simply state my values: connection, agency, self-improvement, persistence, with a sense of gratitude for the chance to do so. It’s evolved significantly as it’s framed towards serving a larger audience, and that’s a refinement that indicates progress in how I express myself.

If you’re ready to take a crack at it, try out this exercise. I’m glad I did again as I can review my progress and reaffirm my commitment to this process.

If I were to ask you who you were, how would you respond?

Again, I’m building the Skool community as a repository for all the work I’m doing here. It’s not just what I’ve started now, it’s also everything that I’ve worked on since the beginning of this newsletter. To save you from having to dig into all the work I’ve done (and slogging through some rather rough writing), that’s where I’ll be pulling everything into a more coherent system.

I will put the link in when it’s ready!