What does it mean that creating yourself through action?

You become who you are through what you do, not through what you think or intend.

Example: Dara spent two years describing herself as a writer. She talked about writing at dinner parties. She read books about the craft. She kept a folder of ideas she planned to develop someday. She thought of herself as someone who writes. But she had not written anything in fourteen months. Then she read Sartre's claim that a coward is not a coward because of a cowardly disposition — a coward is a coward because of cowardly acts. She realized the same logic applied in reverse: a writer is not a writer because of a writerly temperament. A writer is someone who writes. She started writing six hundred words every morning before work. After four months she had drafts of eleven essays and the first chapter of a memoir. She did not become a writer by discovering her inner writer. She became a writer by writing. The identity followed the action, not the other way around.

Try this: Identify one identity you claim but rarely enact — something you say you are but do not consistently do. Write down the specific actions that would constitute that identity if performed regularly. Then commit to one of those actions, once per day, for seven consecutive days. At the end of the week, write a brief reflection: did performing the actions change how you see yourself? Did the identity feel more real after a week of enactment than it did after months or years of self-description? Notice the direction of causation. You did not act because you finally believed you were that person. You began to believe because you acted.