In today’s society, many young people struggle with dissatisfaction and lack of energy in their lives. ”I have to wake up early for work” or ”I should exercise more” are typical complaints. However, both of these sentences have a very negative connotation in them. But rather than thinking that waking up early is always due to gloomy must-do-labor that brings food to the table and exercise is always done because you just should do it, why not take a step back and look at these things from a bigger perspective?

If you happen to utter those sentences yourself every once and a while, you should ask yourself these questions: who am I? What kind of person am I? Who do I want to be? These questions are the most fundamental questions that a person can ask themselves. For you to answer those questions, let’s look at someone else, for whom these questions are quite easy to answer: Jesus.

The case with Jesus is pretty strange not only because the Bible states that he was both a man and God simultaneously but also because he is regarded in the Western culture as the perfect man. He responded to every situation with compassion, truth, and great articulation. There is no flaw in him. So now asking the question ”Why didn’t Jesus do bad things” is pretty easy to answer: That is something Jesus did not do, because it is something that Jesus doesn’t do, by definition.

To carry this idea to your typical, less ambitious case in the modern world: Why wouldn’t you wake up early or why wouldn’t you exercise? If you have built yourself up properly and you know who you are and where you should be as a person, only then you can answer these questions properly. ”I wake up early because that’s what I am and the person I want to become does”. ”I exercise daily because that’s what I and the person I want to become does”. When you can genuinely believe those sentences, you know that those ”habits”, as you call them, will stick because they are part of you, and doing otherwise would just shred your identity apart.

I am optimistic that if all young people in today’s society were taught this type of thinking, through identity rather than habit or obligation we would have a world full of responsible, disciplined, well-mannered, and sophisticated individuals. One cannot understate the effect that this kind of mindset shift could do on a person and how that single person could affect his whole environment, and more precisely, for the better.