Aggressive Redemption: How to Destroy the Past With The Life You Choose to Live Now

Never doom. It's not over.

I get it.

It feels like those moments from the past — the times you fell short, the times you failed to attempt out of fear, the times you broke the promises you made to yourself — feel like bricks cemented into the story of who you are.

You come to think you are your past. You give the past supernatural powers that cast a spell on your future.

After a while, inertia starts to set in. Each day of your life continues to confirm that you are just not cut out for what you want, which makes it that much harder to try again because, what's the use?

What's going to make this time any different? Isn't it time to stop kidding yourself and just resign yourself to your fate?

You get 'quiet desperation,' that comes from realizing there is so much available to you in life, but you just aren't going to do a damn thing about it. You can rationalize it away and lie to yourself all you want, but every once in a while, that voice will whisper to you and say you're wasting your life.

I’m not trying to give you false hope or some cliché motivational speech when I say what I’m about to say next because it’s something I genuinely believe. It’s the belief that helped me crawl from the deepest depths of despair over and over again.

You are under no obligation to be who you were yesterday, a week ago, a month ago, or even who you've been for the majority of your life. The past doesn't matter; it doesn't define who you are, and the only meaning it has is the one you assign it.

The past isn't real

Your entire life is nothing but a series of 'nows.' There is no such thing as an actual past. It's just a construct in your mind that mostly serves as a way to block you from being who you'd like to be right now.

The past isn't an objective account of what has happened in your life either. It is a cherry-picked patchwork of memories, some of which never happened. It's not fixed and unchangeable either.

Have you ever gone through a situation that felt horrible in the moment or days after, but felt like a step forward months or years later? Things like breakups, losing our jobs, or going through some health scare take different meanings in our minds depending on how long it has been since the thing happened.

Usually, it takes time for us to change our minds about these things, but it's a reminder that you always have the power to change the meaning of what has happened. What you perceive as the past is nothing more than the story you're telling yourself about events that have happened.

And the main narrative that holds us back is the story that we have to remain a certain way just because we've been a certain way. It's the story that the past has predictive power. It's this fictional idea that you just are the way you are because your past gave you no other choice.

For most of us, the past is a label maker. It assigns us these 'fixed' traits that cannot be changed. You see the past-driven-lie in phrases that start with the words 'I am."

• I'm an introvert

• I'm not the type of person who takes risks

• I'm not good enough

• I'm a screw up

• I'm a perfectionist

Somewhere along the line, you created a set of labels as a coping mechanism.

When you give yourself a label you built from your past, you get a convenient excuse. You get a way to absolve yourself from taking action. You create a shield to hide yourself from the idea that you could be living the exact life you'd like to live, but you're just choosing not to because you're afraid. You give yourself a way to avoid responsibility over your life, your decisions, and your current circumstances.

But there’s no such thing as a way you must behave. Your identity is always the one you choose.

You're Choosing How You Want to Live

Why would anyone choose to live a life they don't want? Well, because they have no choice but to choose. You have free will and the ability to make choices based on the way you perceive your circumstances.

Of course, your environment and upbringing play a role. If you grew up in poverty where you saw nothing but crime, drug addiction, and violence around you, being in that type of environment will make you much more likely to continue the cycle. But you still have a choice to decide what to do moving forward, regardless of where you start from. And regardless of where you started, it's always the best option to make the best choices you can given the situation.

That's the magic trick we play on ourselves. We choose how we want to live right now and use the past to justify our decisions. Why? Because, above all else, we tend to crave what's familiar, even if it means we hate our lives, because we can make sense out of the familiar.

There's a perverse comfort that comes from settling into a groove of living a life we don't want. The devil you know is better than the one you don't, and few things terrify us more than moving into an uncertain future because, in that uncertain future, there might be a newer, worse, more brutal type of pain than the pain we're experiencing right now.

When you enter an uncertain territory, you have no idea what's around the corner, what crushing ego blows, heartbreaks, and self-esteem destroying calamities are around the corner. You can't control the dosage of pain when you put yourself out there in a real way. So instead, you dole out a steady dose of dull yet consistent pain instead of risking the sharp, unpredictable kind.

If you want to change, the first step is realizing that, fundamentally, your goal is to same the same, to remain consistent with your identity, and stay exactly who you think you are because who you are is home.

It's really important to have that realization. That you are choosing, no matter how forced the choice may be, to live how you are right now and to also understand you're receiving some payoff for your behavior — you're getting something out of it. That's the key question to ask yourself:

"What am I getting out of currently choosing to live this way?"

You have some present goals you're trying to achieve, and creating character traits as defensive mechanisms.

Your goal is to avoid rejection at all costs, so you manufacture the personality trait of shyness so you can avoid putting yourself out there.

Your goal is to avoid failure, so you manufacture the identity of a perfectionist. That way, you can delay forever under the guise of "doing it right" and never have to confront the possibility that your best might not be good enough.

Your goal is to avoid the shame of being seen trying and still coming up short, so you manufacture the trait of 'being above it all." If nothing matters, you can't fail.

Once you recognize that you’re operating from a set of present goals that you’re using character traits as a means to achieve, you can change your present goals and therefore change your current behaviors. You can start now and begin to put the past in the dust.

You Can Make Up For Lost Time

You have to hold these paradoxical beliefs in your mind at the same time: You have an eternity left to turn things around. You have no time whatsoever. You're both the oldest and youngest you've ever been, so it's time to live out the adage:

"The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now"

Lamenting over the past is useless. You can kick yourself over all the time you wasted and run through the scenarios of how you wish things would have worked out. Or you can just let it go and decide to start a new chapter so you can make up for lost time.

The goal of this new chapter? Don't just live for the moment. Live to make up for all of those moments you missed. Overcorrect. Go to the other extreme. Live so fast, bold, and full of courage that you overwhelm your past with pure forward momentum.

I went up to the city to go to a rave party a few weekends back. I linked up with a good friend of mine from college. Back in the day, he was more of the shy and reserved type who didn't socialize a ton at parties or chat up that many women. We're all at the hotel, having a few drinks, getting ready to go out, and it seems much of the same. He's chill, nice, reserved, relatively talkative, but not talkative.

Not sure what it was. Maybe the atmosphere of being in the environment turned some switch on. But the second we get into the club, he's missing. Poof. Just vanished. We look around to see where he went, and there he is talking to a very pretty woman. He proceeded to do this all night. He hit on more girls (in a very respectful way, mind you) in one night than I'd seen him hit on the entirety of the time we were in school. He wasn’t just trying to pick up a date either; he was literally talking to everyone, man, woman, it didn’t matter. Not only was he tired of being the shy guy, but it was like he was trying to right all of the wrongs of his former shy self.

This is the correct response.

We are never going to fully get rid of that mechanism that keeps score. We all have that internal scoreboard that stacks up wins and losses — the wins being the times we went after what we wanted and the times we didn't. So, rather than fight against your nature to keep score, run up the scoreboard. If you're in the second, third, or even fourth quarter of your life, it's time to start chucking up 3's like Caitlin Clark until the clock hits zero.

The beauty of making up for lost time? Each win carries the same weight as 100 losses. As soon as you make that internal pivot to the kind of person you want to be, you just don't care about the past anymore because you see how much runway is available now to the new you. You're reborn, and the world begins to feel like a playground again.

And then that past that ailed you so much? You don't just overcome it. You change it.

Aggressive Redemption

It's time for your comeback tour. It's time to apologize to your past self with your current actions. It's time to wipe away the past failures with one gigantic W.

And perhaps the way forward isn't gradual exposure therapy or CBT, but instead hitting the nuclear button. Like my friend who said, 'Forget slowly working my way up to being more social, I am just going to talk to everybody in the club.' Just this cannonball of catharsis-fueled action to get that monkey off your back once and for all.

It's kind of like when you get into a cold pool. If you go in slowly, you keep getting confirmation that it's too cold, that you should turn back, that this was a bad idea. Every inch deeper just reinforces the shock. But if you just dive in headfirst? The cold hits you all at once, your body adjusts, and suddenly you're swimming. The water that felt impossible to enter slowly becomes completely manageable when you commit to it fully.

That's what aggressive redemption feels like. If you try to slowly become the person you want to be - dipping your toe in, testing the waters, making gradual changes - you keep getting hit with reminders of why you failed before. Every small step forward gets measured against your old patterns. But when you dive in completely, when you shock your system with such radical action that there's no going back, something shifts. The person you were becomes irrelevant because you're already living as someone else.

The cold doesn't get warmer. You get stronger. Your past doesn't disappear. You just become someone it can't touch anymore.

Increase Your Surface Area of Luck

Think about it this way: if you stay in your apartment all day, your surface area for good luck is essentially zero. The only good things that can happen to you are the ones that come through your phone or your door. But if you go out into the world, if you put yourself in new situations, if you start conversations with strangers, if you apply for jobs you think you're not qualified for, if you ask people out who seem out of your league - suddenly your surface area expands exponentially.

Every action you take, every uncomfortable conversation you have, every time you show up somewhere new, you're rolling the dice again. You're giving the universe another chance to surprise you. Most people live with a surface area the size of a postage stamp and then wonder why nothing interesting ever happens to them.

The person who sends out 1,000 resumes has a vastly larger surface area for career luck than the person who sends out 5. The person who approaches 1,000 people they fancy in person has a larger surface area for love than the person who swipes on dating apps from their couch. The person who gives their maximum effort into making each day their masterpiece, thousands of days in a row is pretty much guaranteed to win.

This is why aggressive action works so well. You're exponentially increasing the number of good things that can possibly happen to you. You're putting yourself in the path of serendipity. Your past self had a tiny surface area. Your future self can have a massive one. The difference is action.

What Now?

Since the past is not only done, but not even real. Since you now understand that you always have a choice. Since it's useless to ruminate about events you can change.

The only thing to concern yourself with is what you are going to do now, because now is all you have.

You can change the meaning of what the past means to you right now. You can decide to change right now. You can go on a permanent new trajectory that starts right now.

The goal is to write the script for the type of person you want to be and then proceed to method-act your way into being that person. You will fail. You will try to behave differently than you're accustomed to, and it will feel awkward and weird. But it's not fake.

I hate the phrase 'fake it until you make it,' because there's nothing fake about consciously choosing a new set of behaviors to live out. Wanna know what's fake? This contrived personality and worldview, and this set of current behaviors, are fake. They're inauthentic to the way you'd like to be, so the realest thing you can possibly do is to change how you operate.

Reverse engineer back however it is you'd like to be and make your best attempt at being that person right now. But don't start small. Don't ease into it. Pick one behavior pattern that defines you - a core one, not some surface habit - and tomorrow, do the exact opposite for the entire day. Don't prepare. Don't ease into it. Just be someone else for 24 hours and see what happens.

Once you see you can flip the switch once, the loop loses its power. And once the loop is broken, everything becomes possible again.