Exposure Births Experience
Understanding that the right experiences can open doors is crucial on your journey toward success. It’s pivotal to focus on cultivating the experiences your future self will need to realize your dreams.
During today’s livestream, I delved deeply into the concept of reflection and understanding the gap between our current selves and the future state we aspire to. Recognizing what your ideal future looks like is the first step; the next is taking confident strides toward it.
This begins with understanding what’s needed to reach that future and making consistent progress toward it.
The key variables bridging your current state and your desired future are time and experience. Thus, beginning to accumulate relevant experiences now is vital as you trust the process and await the right moment for them to bear fruit.
Gaining experience first requires exposure to the areas you wish to gain proficiency in. Determine the experiences necessary for achieving your future state, and intentionally immerse yourself in them.
Continuous exposure gradually translates to experience. Let me share a personal example: I aspire to be a speaker at events and conferences, captivating audiences with ease.
Acknowledging this future state, I am making incremental progress toward it by hosting daily livestreams, delivering talks, and motivational speeches. Exposing myself to a similar environment to my future state, albeit not on the same scale, I’m gradually honing the skills my future self will need.
Another vision of mine is becoming an author of multiple best-selling books. This necessitates proficient writing skills. Identifying this as a future goal, I sought exposure to the art of writing to build experience and enhance my skills.
Consequently, I commit to writing daily, regardless of length or topic, enhancing my abilities with each passing day.
So, if there’s something you aspire to do in the future, now is the moment to expose yourself to it, gaining firsthand experience whenever possible. Always bear in mind: exposure is the mother of experience.
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.
