What Are You Grateful For?
Happy Thanksgiving!
As we celebrate this year’s Thanksgiving Day, one of the key reflections should be acknowledging the things for which you are thankful and appreciating their value in your life. Imagine if those things didn’t exist or you didn’t have access to them; what would your life be like?
Now, express gratitude to whoever is responsible for the existence, availability, or access to those things. Take a couple of minutes after reading this post to either write it down or speak it out to yourself:
I am grateful for these things…
And I am grateful to these people…
For making these exist or for granting my access to them.
This simple gratitude exercise goes a long way in helping you appreciate the good things in life. Recognizing that you have these blessings, you should also be aware that there are others who might not.
Thus, it’s a privilege to live the life you have, regardless of any challenges you face. Regularly practicing gratitude, especially when vocalizing it, provides a positive outlook on life and motivates you to overcome difficulties.
Moreover, remember that some people have contributed to the blessings for which you’re grateful. It’s equally important for you to deliberately contribute to reasons others might feel grateful, giving them a reason to celebrate Thanksgiving today.
As you engage in your gratitude exercise, also contemplate ways to add value to the lives of others.
Dr. Ehoneah Obed (Pharmacist, Software Engineer, Health Informatician, Founder)
My work focuses on identity engineering, which is the deliberate process of designing and updating who you are, personally and professionally.
Most people experience identity as something fixed or accidental. It is shaped by parents, early success or failure, education, and society’s definition of what a “good life” looks like. They adapt to it rather than questioning it. What most people do not realize is that identity is not just something you discover. It is something you can actively engineer.
Personal identity engineering is about gaining control over how your beliefs, values, and self-concept are formed and reinforced.
Professional identity engineering is about translating that internal identity into skills, work, leverage, and visible contribution in the world.
When people feel stuck, it is rarely because they lack motivation or talent. It is because they are trying to change outcomes while leaving the underlying identity system untouched. Careers stall. Confidence collapses. Direction feels unclear. The system keeps producing the same results.
I learned this by rebuilding myself multiple times.
I trained as a pharmacist for six years. While working in hospitals, I began learning to code alongside my job. That led to building real software, selling products, transitioning into software engineering, completing a master’s degree in health informatics at the University of Toronto, and now building startups and systems full time. Each transition followed the same pattern. My identity did not change because I thought differently. It changed because I took specific actions that produced new evidence, and that evidence forced a new story about who I was capable of being.
That is the core mechanism behind identity engineering.
Identity updates when you intentionally generate evidence that contradicts your old self-image, then compound that evidence until the old identity can no longer run the system.
This blog is where I document that process. I write about how to design identity experiments that are small, controlled, and reversible. How to build proof-of-work that changes both how you see yourself and how the world responds to you. How to move forward without waiting for clarity, confidence, or permission.
This is not motivation and it is not coaching. It is systems thinking applied to human change.
I also write The Ledger, a weekly record of systems and experiments for building a life you own.
And I built the Identity Audit, a diagnostic tool that helps you understand your current identity state before you attempt to change it.
I am not presenting a finished theory. I am engineering this in real time, using my own life as the test environment. If you want more agency over who you are becoming, both personally and professionally, you are in the right place.
