Life & Wisdom Quote by Marilyn vos Savant

Style, here, is less about looking good than staying psychologically mobile. Marilyn vos Savant frames clothing as a low-stakes laboratory: a place to test identities without committing your whole life to them. The phrasing "be in the habit" is doing quiet heavy lifting. She is not recommending a makeover or a single brave outfit; she is recommending an ongoing practice, a routine of small disruptions that keeps the self from calcifying.

The barb lands in the line about "a self-image developed over the course of high school". High school is where most people get their first hard lesson in visibility: who gets praised, who gets mocked, what reads as safe. Those social pressures produce a kind of survival costume, and vos Savant suggests we carry that costume into adulthood long after the original audience has left the room. The subtext is blunt: a lot of "personal style" is just fossilized teenage coping.

Her intent is also anti-nostalgia. She refuses the comforting idea that there is one authentic, preexisting "you" to uncover. Instead, authenticity becomes iterative: you learn what fits by trying what doesn't. Clothing is the perfect medium for that argument because it's both intimate and reversible. You can change it tomorrow. That reversibility is the point: experimentation trains you to treat identity as adjustable, not fate.

Context matters: vos Savant's public persona is the hyper-rational problem-solver, the person who answers questions with clean logic. This advice reads like applied cognition: avoid premature conclusions, especially about yourself.