Be Your Future Self Now: The Science of Intentional Transformation

by Benjamin P. Hardy

After playing blissfully with Phoebe for about five minutes, I snapped a selfie to always remember the time my Future Self came back and played with his little girl.

Your identity is what you’re most committed to.

The most fundamental threat to a person’s Future Self is not the loss of freedom but the absence of purpose and meaning.

Having a glimmer of hope is akin to having a deposit already banked and earning interest on your future purpose.

A high-hope person, like Frankl himself, remains committed 100 percent to a pursuit, and 100 percent flexible around the path to achieve their goal.

According to renowned trauma expert Dr. Peter Levine, “Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness.”17

“You will be the same person in five years as you are today except for the people you meet and the books you read.”

Performance psychologist Dr. Marshall Goldsmith explained in his book Triggers, “If we do not create and control our environment, our environment creates and controls us.”

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

In 1906, Alfred Henry Lewis stated, “There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy.” Many people are around nine meals away from hunger. Most don’t have a 6-month food supply. They don’t have 12 months of emergency cash.

If you’re living day-to-day, you’re always in a hurry.

“We are kept from our goal not by obstacles, but by a clear path to a lesser goal.”

In the novel Those Who Remain: A Postapocalyptic Novel, author G. Michael Hopf wrote: Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.

If you want to become your desired Future Self, play at their level as quickly as possible. Commit at the level of your Future Self. Adapt at the level of your Future Self. Your current self is clearly not there yet, and will therefore need serious training, humility, and feedback.

“We are kept from our goals not by obstacles, but by a clear path to a lesser goal.”

Anything less than being true to your Future Self is failure.