People Who Are Quitting Smoking Are Always Quitting Smoking

People Who Are Quitting Smoking Are Always Quitting Smoking

Say it out loud and you can hear the problem.

I'm quitting smoking.

That sentence has no end in it. It describes a person mid-effort, and mid-effort is a place you can stay for eleven years. I know because I was there. I was the guy who was quitting for a long time, and every time I said it I was accurately describing what I was doing, which was quitting. Not having quit. Quitting.

Compare it to this one.

I am a non-smoker.

Non-smokers don't buy cigarettes. So I don't buy cigarettes.

Nothing changed except the tense and the shape of the sentence, and everything downstream of it changed.

The formula

Jana and I run it in three parts. It takes about four seconds.

01  I am [identity]
I am a healthy person.

02  People like me do [behavior]
Healthy people eat nutritious food.

03  So today I [choice]
So I'm eating nutritious food.

Whatever follows "I am" is the identity. That's the part your brain treats as settled, and it will go find evidence for it whether or not the evidence is any good. Your brain is not neutral about this. It is loyal, and it is loyal to whatever you told it you are.

The second line does the work most people skip. People like me do this. That's not a rule you're imposing on yourself. It's a description of a category you've just claimed membership in, and it answers the question before willpower has to.

Then the third line is small enough to do today.

I am a healthy person. Healthy people eat nutritious food. So I'm eating nutritious food.

The friction disappears somewhere in the middle of that. You're not overriding a preference. You're behaving consistently with something you already said about yourself, and your brain would much rather be consistent than be right.

What it costs to say I'm quitting

The reason the first sentence traps you is that it's honest.

You're describing an effort in progress, and as long as you're describing an effort in progress, the effort has to keep being in progress for the sentence to stay true. Your brain will protect that. It'll keep the struggle alive, because the struggle is the identity you handed it.

Going to, gonna, starting Monday. All of those put the thing out ahead of you where you have to chase it, and chasing something means it stays in front of you and you keep tripping over it. Am is right here. Already arrived. Nothing to catch.

Words matter more than people give them credit for. Almost everything we do runs through communication in some form, and communication is translation. You're translating something in your head into something that exists out loud, and if the version you translate into is always a future state, the future state is where it stays.

Now here's the objection, and it's a fair one.

I say I'm a non-smoker. Then Thursday happens and I smoke a cigarette. Doesn't that make me a liar?

No. It makes me a non-smoker who smoked a cigarette in a moment of weakness.

I know how that sounds. Follow it out anyway, because we already accept this everywhere else.

I act like a child on a fairly regular basis. That does not make me sixteen. I would never look at myself after a childish afternoon and conclude I'd reverted to being a teenager, and I wouldn't want to, and I wouldn't say it. What I'd say is I'm someone who's young at heart, with youthful energy in what I do.

One behavior doesn't overwrite an identity. It never has. We only pretend it does when the behavior is one we're ashamed of.

That's the whole difference between a slip and a collapse.

The evidence locker

Here's where the identity comes from in the first place, and it's less romantic than the formula makes it sound.

We started with the bed.

Make the bed every morning. That's it. I said I was going to do it and then I did it, and Jana, who has standards in a way that has occasionally been inconvenient for me, made sure I kept doing it.

She gets told to lower her expectations. Her answer is to raise your standards.

There have been mornings when I asked whether we really had to make the bed right now, and afternoons when I have asked whether flossing was strictly necessary at that particular hour. The answer both times was yes, delivered without any apparent internal conflict.

The bed is not the point. The check mark is the point.

Every kept promise goes in a win column, and that column becomes an evidence locker. Over enough entries it stops being a list and starts being a description. I am a person who does what I said I'd do. Not because you affirmed it. Because there's a stack of it.

That's the whole mechanism, running in whichever direction you've been feeding it. If you've spent years building evidence that you don't finish things, you'll become a person who doesn't finish things, and you'll have been fair to yourself in concluding it. The work is not arguing with the evidence. It's collecting different evidence.

Don't bet it all on black

Now the failure mode, and it's the one that has cost me the most.

Two weeks in. Going well. Deposits stacking up, evidence accumulating, and it's working.

Then you slip. One meal, one missed morning, one cigarette.

And instead of losing one day, you liquidate the entire account. Screw it. Buy the pie, buy the ice cream, we'll start over Monday.

You had a good hand and you shoved everything onto black on a bad one.

I did this three separate times with cigarettes. Nine months clean, then nine months, then nine months again. And every time, the thing that ended it was a night out and a celebratory smoke.

Celebratory. I want you to sit with that word as long as I've had to.

I'd banked nine months of evidence and then spent it as a reward for having banked it. It made a kind of sense at the time, the way most self-sabotage does right up until the next morning.

That's the same thing from the last section wearing different clothes. The cigarette didn't revoke the identity. I did, the next day, when I decided the celebration meant I'd been lying about who I was.

The reason isn't laziness. It's that your trust account got higher than you're used to carrying, and the discomfort of that is real. Progress that outruns your idea of yourself feels wrong, and one mistake gives you a reason to return to a baseline that's familiar. Struggle is uncomfortable. Struggle is also known.

The slip is feedback. Two weeks of deposits are still in the account, and they're still yours. The only way to lose them is to decide they don't count.

Why an outside voice

Jana and I can both see this pattern clearly in each other, which sounds useful and is only about half as useful as it sounds.

I can spot her blind spots. She can spot mine. But she doesn't need me pointing them out and I don't much want to hear it from her, which is the physics of being married rather than a flaw in either of us.

That's why we both have our own coaches. Somebody outside the house sees it without a decade of context attached, and can say the thing without it landing as an old argument.

They'll also tell you it's feedback rather than failure, at the exact moment you've decided to bet it all on black. That timing is most of what you're paying for.

The Living Lucky® Practice

Exercise: write your three lines. I am, people like me do, so today I. Pick an identity you're willing to defend and a today's-choice small enough to finish.

Reflection question: what have I been telling myself I'm quitting or starting or getting around to, that I could say in the present tense instead?

Journal prompt: where have I bet it all on black after a good run, and what did the slip actually cost before I made it cost more?

Action: pick one repeatable thing, do it today, and write it down. That's the first deposit.

Frequently asked questions

What is the "I am" identity formula?

Three lines. I am the kind of person who is a certain thing, people like me do a certain behavior, and therefore I do that behavior today. It moves the decision from willpower to consistency, since your mind would rather act in line with what you've claimed than fight you over each individual choice.

Why is "I'm quitting" less effective than "I am a non-smoker"?

Because quitting describes an ongoing effort, and an ongoing effort has to keep going for the sentence to remain true. The present-tense version describes a settled fact about who you are, and behavior lines up behind it more easily.

Is this the same as positive affirmations?

There's an important difference. An affirmation your mind rejects makes things worse, because you end up rehearsing the doubt. Identity statements work when there's evidence behind them, which is why the small kept promises matter more than the wording.

Why do I sabotage myself right when things are going well?

Progress that gets ahead of your idea of yourself creates real discomfort, and a slip provides a reason to return to a familiar baseline. Recognizing that pattern in advance is most of the defense against it.

What's an evidence locker?

A running record of kept commitments. It's the raw material identity is built from, and it works because you can't argue with a list of things you actually did.

Why do I need a coach if I can already see the problem?

Seeing it and being able to act on it from inside it are different things. An outside perspective has no history with you, which means it can name something without the naming turning into an old conversation.

One more thing

My dad used to say you can fix your credit, but you can't fix your word.

Jana grew up in farm country where deals got done on a handshake and the handshake was the contract. Nobody called an attorney. If you said you'd do it, you did it, hell or high water.

I don't know that we're going back to that. But the account he was talking about and the one I've been describing turn out to be the same account, and there's only one person who can check the balance.

Quitting smoking took me years and more failed attempts than I can count. I'm disappointed I ever started and proud I got out. Both of those are true and neither one is interesting on its own.

What's useful is the part I got wrong three times in a row, which is that nine months of evidence is not a thing you spend. It's a thing you keep.

Make the bed. Write it down.

We Create Our Luck®.

We went deeper on this on the Living Lucky® Podcast, Season 11, Episode 27.