I’ve got a friend back in Melbourne, a guy I’ve known since uni, who spent thirty years convinced he was a lawyer. Not just doing law — being a lawyer, identity-wise, down to the shoes. Then at 57 he quit, moved to a coastal town, and started a small woodworking business. I saw him last year and the thing that struck me wasn’t the career change. It was that he seemed more himself than he had in two decades. Like the lawyer thing was the costume and this was the guy underneath.
And then there’s my uncle, who’s the opposite. Same opinions he had in 1994. Same grievances, same political takes, same certainty about how the world works. But ask his kids who he is and they’ll give you three different answers depending on which decade he was around them. His opinions are welded shut. His actual self has been drifting the whole time.
Once you see the distinction between those two, it becomes impossible to unsee. And it explains a lot about why some people build genuinely extraordinary lives while others, often with more raw talent or better starting conditions, end up stuck somewhere around 40 and stay there.
Most people do the exact opposite of my mate from Melbourne. They hold their opinions with a death grip and let their identity drift with whatever crowd or circumstance they find themselves in. By 60, they’ve defended every position they ever took, sometimes against their own obvious interests, while quietly becoming a slightly different person every decade depending on who they were with. They’ve got the worst of both patterns running at once.
The people who accomplished remarkable things by 60, almost without exception, inverted this.
The research on changing your mind
Jeff Bezos has made the point cleanly. In a now-famous conversation at Basecamp’s office, he observed that the people who are right a lot are the people who often change their minds. He doesn’t think consistency of thought is a particularly positive trait. He sees it as a sign that someone has stopped updating.
Bezos isn’t alone. Research in cognitive science has mapped this in more detail. A trait called epistemic humility, which is essentially the willingness to treat your current beliefs as provisional and update them when new information arrives, correlates reliably with better forecasting, better decision-making, and better long-term outcomes.
The mechanism is simple. The world changes faster than any one person’s beliefs about it. If your beliefs don’t update, they get more wrong every year you hold them, not less.
Most people flip this. They spend their twenties and thirties forming views, then spend their forties and fifties defending those views against evidence. By their sixties, some of their beliefs haven’t been touched by new information in thirty years. That’s not wisdom. That’s fossilisation.
The research on holding your identity
The second half is the counterweight, and it’s the part most people get wrong in the opposite direction.
Cognitive psychology has a concept called stability versus flexibility, which describes the brain’s dual task of holding goals steady while still being able to switch between them when necessary. A paper in Nature Reviews Psychology discusses how these two capacities, once thought to be opposed, can actually operate independently. The healthiest minds aren’t the ones that are maximally flexible or maximally stable. They’re the ones that can be appropriately stable about core things and appropriately flexible about peripheral ones.
The people who build remarkable lives have figured out, usually through painful experience, which is which. They know that their identity, their values, their sense of who they are and what they stand for, is the stable part. And they know that their opinions, their models, their tactical beliefs about how the world works, are the flexible part. Most people invert this. They hold a tactical belief about, say, how their industry operates like it’s load-bearing identity, and then they let their actual identity, their core self, shift every time they enter a new social environment. They’re impossibly rigid about things that should be fluid, and impossibly fluid about the things that should be solid.
What “identity less often” actually means
This is the part that needs care, because it’s subtle.
Identity here isn’t the superficial layer. It isn’t your job title, your preferred political tribe, or your Instagram bio. Those things should change. Careers pivot. Views mature. Aesthetics evolve.
The identity the remarkable people keep stable is deeper. It’s the thing that stays true across contexts. The core values they’d defend in a dinner with strangers, a fight with their spouse, a crisis at work, and a funeral. The commitments that don’t shift based on who’s watching. The sense of what kind of person they are trying to be, regardless of whether it’s rewarded at the moment.
Look, think about Bowie. The aesthetics changed every album. The core didn’t.
When you watch people who’ve accomplished unusual things over a long arc, you notice this immediately. Their work evolved hugely. Their companies pivoted. Their public beliefs changed. Their strategies got scrapped and rebuilt more than once. But something underneath all of that stayed the same across forty years, and that something is what carried them through the inevitable hard stretches.
What “changed their minds more often” actually looks like
In the daily texture of a life, it looks almost nothing like what people imagine.
It isn’t dramatic flip-flopping. It isn’t being wishy-washy. It isn’t avoiding commitment. Most of the mind-changing happens quietly, inside their own head, in the week after a new piece of information arrives. They read something that contradicts a view they’ve held for ten years. Instead of getting defensive, they sit with it. They ask whether the new thing might actually be right. They test it. If it holds up, they update. They don’t make a big announcement. They just start acting, a few months later, on the new view. The old view quietly gets demoted without ceremony.
They have conversations where, instead of defending their position, they ask what would have to be true for the other person to be right. They notice when their own argument starts reaching, and they let themselves lose the argument. Losing an argument, to them, is a small tax. Holding a wrong belief for a decade is an enormous one.
They’re comfortable saying “I used to think X but I don’t anymore” in public without feeling like they’ve lost face. Because their identity isn’t riding on X. Their identity is riding on being the kind of person who updates.
Why most people do it backwards
If this pattern is so predictive of unusual accomplishment, why do so few people run it?
Because honestly, it’s genuinely uncomfortable in the short term. Changing your mind feels like admitting you were wrong, which the ego treats as a small death. Holding your identity steady feels like being boring, which a culture of reinvention treats as failure.
So the ego optimises in exactly the wrong direction. It over-defends the small thing, the opinion, because being wrong feels acute and personal. And it under-defends the big thing, the identity, because holding a stable self in a shifting environment requires patience the culture no longer rewards.
The ones who figure out how to run it correctly are the ones who have something stable enough inside that they don’t need their opinions to carry their self-worth. They can be wrong about a business idea, a political take, or a life choice without feeling like they, as people, have been diminished.
That’s the whole trick. And it’s why some people accomplish things by 60 that seem impossible, while others, often with better cards, end up defending positions nobody else cares about.
What the Buddhists understood about this
When I wrote Hidden Secrets of Buddhism, one of the hardest ideas to translate for Western readers was the concept of non-self, or anatta. It is not, as people often assume, a denial that you exist. It’s the more useful observation that most of what you think is “you” is actually a shifting cloud of opinions, preferences, and reactions, and that mistaking this cloud for your real self is what causes most of your suffering.
The serious practice, on the cushion or in life, is to notice the cloud from a slightly quieter place. When an opinion changes, you notice the opinion changing, without panicking that you are changing. When someone disagrees with your view, you notice the view being challenged, without feeling that you are being challenged.
This is the Buddhist version of what Bezos was pointing at in a management context. A self that isn’t tangled up with every passing belief can update beliefs without crisis. It can be wrong in the morning and right by dinner, and neither feels like an identity earthquake. The core is stable because it isn’t built on the beliefs. It’s built on something quieter and older.
The people I’ve met here in Saigon and in the older cohort of meditators I know back in Australia who have done this work for decades have exactly this quality. They’ll cheerfully tell you they used to believe the opposite of what they believe now. They don’t flinch. They don’t defend. They just update.
The pattern to notice in yourself
If you want to run the test on your own life, it’s simple.
How often, in the last year, have you actually changed your mind about something substantial? Not a tactical adjustment. A real update, where you ended up in a different position than you started. If the answer is zero, your beliefs have stopped interacting with reality.
And in the other direction, how often, in the last year, have you felt pressure to quietly become a different person depending on who you were with? If the answer is often, your identity is being shaped by your environment rather than by you.
The remarkable people reverse both of these. They hold their core with both hands and hold their opinions with an open one.
Honestly, I notice how rarely I actually manage it myself. I’ll catch myself defending some throwaway take from three years ago like it’s a family heirloom, and then twenty minutes later shape-shifting slightly because I’m in a room where the vibe is different. The inversion is easy to describe. It’s the practising of it that seems to take most of a lifetime, and maybe that’s the whole point.
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