The Story of How I Changed My Reality in 72 hours — 3 Times

The forests behind the I AM ESCAPE retreat location in Austria.

Reality is a Product of Identity

The only thing holding you in your current reality is the identity you keep rehearsing. Change that identity and the timeline shifts instantly. Most of us are taught that transformation is earned over years of grinding, struggling, proving. That’s a trap. Time is not something you crawl through; it’s something you project. You don’t become successful, wealthy, or awakened little by little. You collapse the version of yourself who isn’t, and step into the version who already is.

Ancient mystics and modern high-performers have known this for centuries: you don’t chase reality, you shift into it. The fastest way I’ve found to do this is through what I call an “identity override.” For 72 hours, you live only as the person you intend to be. Every decision, every action, every word comes from that identity. No hesitation, no second-guessing. When the old reality comes at you with its antibodies (as it always does) you don’t flinch. You observe it for what it is: a lag, an echo, a fading timeline. And then you choose again.

I’ve done this three times in my life. Each time, the shift felt almost too fast to be believable. Yet once the new reality arrived, it felt so natural I wondered why I ever thought it was out of reach. This is the story of those three 72-hour experiments, and what they taught me about conviction, identity, and the nature of reality itself.

The First Identity Override

So much of life revolves around the way we show up in the world. How we think and speak of ourselves is how we see ourselves. It’s how others see us. It’s our identity. But what happens when your identity no longer serves you? Where do you go to override the old identity with something useful?

When we started asking these questions at our Second Harvest retreats, I had a my own identity override story to share. I had lived this idea of identity override, long before I had the language for it.

The first time was when I joined the army. I’d bumbled my way through high school. In my own head, I was “not the academic type,” and that label felt like it was carved in stone. Poor grades, and low confidence was the norm for me.

On graduating high school I entered the army, a place where nobody knew me. For the first 72 hours, I decided to act like the most competent, capable version of myself, even though I didn’t fully believe it yet. I carried myself differently. I spoke differently. I took on challenges as if I could handle them. Within days, I wasn’t acting anymore. I was that person. Within months I was in the top 1% of my class and not long after I was graduating as an officer.

Identity Upgrade

The second time was when I created the “CEO” identity override. I’d been working for other people for several years, and there was this persistent belief that I’d always be an employee. I just thought that I’d always have to work for someone else. But one day, I decided I’d had enough of that story. I pitched a startup idea to a friend and I gave myself the title. I was admittedly nervous, but I didn’t flinch.

And for the next three days, I operated as if I was already the CEO of a startup. I made decisions faster. I spoke with authority. I acted like someone whose role was to set the vision, not just execute it. By the end of that week, my life had shifted to match the identity. Within a few months we had raised VC funding and closed our first clients.

Picking A New Reality, By Picking a New Identity

I also did this when I decided to be an author. The idea that I could be an author was completely foreign to me. I has struggled through English classes and had dyslexia (probably why I struggled). Being a writer wasn’t my identity. But then I remembered that I had overridden my old beliefs before and I decided to try it again.

I decided I could pretend to be an author for a week, so over the period of 5 days I sat down with my friend and we wrote 75,000 words, designed the cover and pages, and announced on social media we were publishing a new book. No permission, just naïve action. Of course, the manuscript needed editing and rewriting, but I had overcome my identity crisis and made it happen.

That book went on to sell 10,000+ copies in 13 languages.

Practical Advice on Identity Overrides

If you can hold that new identity for 3 days (72 hours), your life follows. Then reinforcing that behavior over the next 100 days makes it unshakable:

1. Repeat the cycle: Constantly reinforce your new identity in whatever way makes the most sense for you.
2. Engineer your environment. Remove anything, and avoid anyone, that drags you back into the old identity.
3. Ignore the metrics. In the short term, it’s better to focus on how it feels to be in that new identity than on the numbers.
4. Run thin slice experiments. Break projects into small tests that build momentum.
5. Calibrate. Every couple of weeks, make small tweaks to reinforce the shift.

While change is sold to us as a long, grinding road, you can collapse the time between who you were and who you want to be in days. Step into the identity first, then let your reality catch up. Reality is an outcome of how we feel, think and act. Outsmart reality by creating it.

72+100. Three days to step into the new identity and then one hundred days to make it permanent. I invite you to try it.

This perspective on identity override, and many more, are the basis of the work we do at Second harvest. At Second Harvest we’re not another self-help program. Instead we run a series of retreats and gatherings designed for people at midlife who want more from their second act without the grind of their first. We meet in beautiful places, around long tables, and through shared adventures, where people can step back, see their lives with fresh perspective, and make choices with courage and clarity. There are no gurus or gimmicks, just a community of peers willing to do the work of becoming who they need to be next. Consider joining us.