ISSUE 025 2026.10.18
You Need To Let Your Old Self Die.
Nothing in your life will change until your old self dies.
In this article, I’m going to give you four things that you can actually do about it.
But before we start, please understand this. You can work to let go of absolutely anything, regardless of what you’ve been through. How do I know? Because I did. There were many times when I actually didn’t want any of this. I was, as most people would say, “rock bottom”.
The real question is whether you will let it all go.
I promise there’s a way, and in this article you will get to understand that process more, but you need to individually work to let it go.
Yes, you need to put in the hard work, even for letting go of the past.
Most people can’t let go because they don’t truly understand what they’re letting go of. Your brain might not even fathom this idea of letting go, so let’s try and understand why we should even let go in the first place.
Why Let Go?
The first reason is if you haven’t already noticed, the past is only holding you back.
Please get to grips with what I’m saying here.
There is nothing positive in this present moment of holding so tightly to the past. I don’t care what it is. A relationship, a circumstance, a situation, a mistake, a painful moment. Even if it’s a successful long run that you’ve had with some sort of endeavour that now you’re just caught up on. It doesn’t have to be a negative experience; it can also be a positive thing.
And this is the scariest part.
One of the reasons you’re still holding on to it is because you think that if you do let that thing go, somehow your life will worsen. You believe that letting go will open yourself up to threats. But they’re all just hangups.
We need to understand what the past is. What is it that we are not letting go of? This will be one of the steps that we will go over later.
The other thing is, you’re not caught up in the past, you’re caught up on a concept. The past is a concept. It’s not real. It was real at some point in time, but it’s not real anymore.
The future is also a concept.
The only thing that’s real is now.
Reading these words is reality. Everything else is just a conceptualisation.
I say the future is a concept too because most of the problems you think are going to happen is not even real. It’s a concept that lives in your head and steals away your attention, peace and energy rent free.
The world could end tomorrow.
There might not be a tomorrow.
Both of these, past and the future, only exist because you keep bringing it up back up.
Everything Is Consciousness
I need your full attention and focus for this next part.
Everything to some extent is consciousness.
Ideas are a consciousness.
In the Creator Business Essentials guide, I tell creators to immediately use up the ideas that come to their mind by writing them down and making notes. Sounds spiritual, but if you don’t, the idea will move on to someone else.
Do you ever have that thing where you consume someone else’s work, and think to yourself, “I wish I wrote that!” Or “How didn’t I come up with that?”. You probably did. It’s just that you didn’t give it your energy, attention, and focus. Your mind was probably elsewhere. And that elsewhere is either the past or the future.
Most of your problems will root back to what we’re going to talk about in this article.
Everything around you is indeed just that. A consciousness that wants life. Concepts crave life. And your past only exists because you keep bringing it back up. You keep giving it life.
Your Brain Can Only Build From Your Past
Here’s the thing about your brain. It does not build a future out of nothing. Even the current state of planet earth is built from the past.
Your brain builds your future out of your past.
Harvard researcher, Daniel L Schacter, spent years studying all of this. What he found is that when you imagine your future, your brain is not creating something new. It’s pulling pieces out of your memory and reassembling them into a version of what’s coming up.
I personally find that fascinating.
You imagine tomorrow with pieces of yesterday.
I know I mentioned that your past is a concept and that it’s not real. But the contradiction here is that, even though it’s not real, it’s all that your brain has.
What other data does your brain pull from if not the data from your past?
Your future is literally being built out of the raw material of your past.
Let’s put that into context.
If the only data that your brain has of you is the version of you who quits two weeks into doing something, or the version of you that says yes when they internally mean no, or the version of you that’s broke, or the version of you that’s anxious, or the version of you that talks about themselves like garbage—how amazing do you think this future that it’s going to create will be?
Which is why the now is super important. You can’t solve this problem at any other time other than now.
When you try to imagine a future (something that you’re already constantly doing, thinking about the future), your brain goes into its archive, it pulls up who you’ve been and manifests a slightly nicer version of the same life.
It cannot imagine a future that it has no footage of.
The real reason why only you can change your life is because only you can provide that footage to your brain.
Everyone talks about generic self-help, almost no one talks about the power of imagination.
If you have the same sets of beliefs with no hope or imagination of a better future, you are not creating a new life, you are recreating the old life with a new set of decorations.
Goals are futile. You don’t need a goal. You need an obsession.
An ideal version of yourself that you contemplate on so often in so much detail that your brain starts treating that person as a memory instead of a fantasy. Doing this gives your brain the ability to pull from raw data from a memory that happens to be imagined that can now construct your future.
I would think on success all day long and wonder why I wasn’t making any progress. I thought I was obsessed. And I was. But I was just obsessed with the wrong guy.
I would think about success from the lens of my failures and insecurities. I rehearsed in my own mind my limiting beliefs every single day. I was devoted to this old version of me.
Everyone to some extent struggles to move forward in life because they keep going back to who they were.
The aim here is not to feel guilty about the past and who you were. It’s to stop being extremely disciplined at being loyal to an older version of you who’s not taking you where you want to go. To stop being loyal to your old self and start being loyal to the person you’re trying to build yourself into.
If you’re a creator, strategist, visionary, leader, innovator, or just someone who creates solutions with their mind, I’d highly recommend you join my free guide below.
The quickest way to change from your old self into your new self is to show evidence of it. And the best way to do that, not only for yourself but for the entire world to see, is by building online. Doing it on your own is fine, but a more powerful version of change is to display to the world who you’re becoming. The aim with all of this is to create as much evidence of this “new you” as possible.
I went completely ghost mode on social media for the past few years. I didn’t write. I didn’t upload videos. I practically didn’t do anything. My life took the biggest downturn. I didn’t do anything because there was no reason for me to. I wouldn’t wake up with excitement because there was nothing for me to create. I wouldn’t dress or make myself presentable because I didn’t have a reason to.
I would notice myself getting unhealthier and more unattractive.
That’s why short-form video content is important: it gives you the daily reminder of who you are becoming and what you’re building.
Long-form does the same but it’s more of a reminder of what you’re building in the long run.
Short form is where you attract minds to your vision.
Long-form is where you build minds toward your vision.
When I say “obsession”, this is what I actually mean. Do you remember your first love? When you were like 17 years old getting into your first long-term relationship and being obsessed with that person.
A song comes on and it reminds you of them.
You walk past a restaurant that you guys went to on your first date and that reminds you of them.
That’s what I call OBSESSION.
Nothing else in the world existed except for that person.
Do you see how the concept of that person was very strong in your brain? That’s the type of obsession I want you to have for this new version of yourself. Think about who you’re building yourself into every single day.
Here’s exactly how to actually break out of the old version of yourself and instead build the new version of yourself:
1) Confirm Your Old Self Is Dead (& Get Very Specific About Who Died.)
What happens when someone dies? They’re gone.
That is the exact same energy that you need to have around the old version of you. You have to blatantly ignore everything around you that reminds you of them. Make sure to do it intentionally.
Stop being so loyal to the version of you that you do not want to be anymore.
You need to know who exactly you’re killing off. Get a pen and some paper and write out which old versions of you need to die off.
What did they believe?
How did they treat themselves?
What did they do every single day?
What did they settle for?
What were their fears?
How did they talk to other people?
Write out each sentence and confirm to yourself that person is gone forever. You can’t exactly cut something off if you’re not clear on what you’re cutting off.
2) Get Obsessively Detailed On Who You are Becoming
This is the other half of the work.
A lot of people make one huge mistake when trying to change.
Killing the old version of yourself won’t work if there’s nothing to replace it with.
A vague future self will always lose to a vivid past memory every single time.
Think about what we’re fighting with here. Your old self has 20+, or however many years of footage. It has evidence, receipts, stories, scars. The new version of yourself is a blurry idea that you may have thought about a few times.
Tell me, if your mind relies on data and footage, who’s going to win this fight?
You need to make the future version of yourself so specific to the point that envisioning this person becomes easy.
It’s not about saying, “I want to be successful”, or “I want to lose weight”, or “I want to be happy.”
That means nothing to your brain.
What time do they wake up?
What do they eat?
How do they handle situations when someone disrespects them?
What does he or she say no to without feeling guilty about it?
How do they stop people pleasing?
What does their bank account look like?
What does their calendar look like? What do they do at 9pm on a Tuesday when no one is watching?
A UCLA researcher named Hal Hershfield, who studied future self-continuity, found that when people think about their future self, their brain activity looks like they were looking at and thinking about a stranger.
A different person entirely.
This is the reason why most people aren’t successful. It’s easy to give up on your future self because your brain literally registers them as a stranger.
We have to recreate this process so that you feel like you’re doing it for someone you know rather than a complete stranger.
Make this person real.
They need to exist in your mind in vivid detail.
Before you get out your phone the second you wake up, before the noise of the world, give yourself just 5 minutes to see that version of yourself, to live in that life, to store memories of it and to watch them throughout the day. Build a connection to that person. Give your brain new footage to build your future self out of.
3) Start To See Everything From The Lens Of The New Version Of Yourself
Every single decision you make should come down to one question:
“What would the new version of me do right now?”
That’s your life’s filter from now on. Every decision, not just the big ones but also the small ones because that’s mostly where you old self lives (in your daily routine).
Would the new version of me sleep in right now?
Would the new version of me skip the workout?
Would the new version of me pick this fight with my partner over something so stupid?
Would the new version of myself open up Instagram and start scrolling for 15 minutes?
What you feel like doing is usually the screams of your lower self. It’s what the dead want. Instead, ask yourself what the new version of you would do in this circumstance and use that to help make your decisions. Every time you do that, you're sending your brain a new piece of evidence of who you’re becoming.
You don’t need to become someone new today. You just need to make them the filter for how you should act going forward.
Don’t choose short-term relief (old self) over long-term desire (new desired self).
4) Do Not Go Back To The Dead
You have to be more loyal to who you’re becoming than who you’ve been.
I want you to literally marry your future self. To never cheat on them with your old self.
The old self is not loud. They’re not a monster. They’re sneaky. It comes back as very sweet things (comfort). It comes back on a Thursday night when you’re tired and whispers, “Just one night off.”
The old version of you sounds like relief but it’s a trap.
Every time you go back to them, you’re telling your brain they’re still alive. It’s literally like going back to an ex that has treated you terribly.
Stop accepting it.
People around you will try to bring the old version of you back to life. They knew them. They were comfortable with them. Everyone is a mirror to everyone else. When you improve, it shows what they lack.
Other people’s reaction to you is not your problem to manage.
Don’t blame them, because the brain likes predictability. You see, their brain is also playing against them.
Just be self-aware of how the brain hates change in general, not only your brain but every single brain inside every human being.
That’s all from me for this week.
I hope you found it helpful!
-Serkan