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April 2 - April 29, 2024
As a rule, our decision-making is myopic, shortsighted, and lacks imagination. We’re heavily incentivized to seek rewards in the present, which can greatly cost our long-term Future Selves.
Another step of empathy is appreciating how your actions, or inactions, impact the other person. In this case, how are your current behaviors impacting your Future Self? The more conscious you become of how everything you do right now impacts the person you are in the future, the better and more thoughtful your actions will be.
When you truly care about another person, you aren’t put-off by making sacrifices of your time, energy, and resources for them. You’ll sacrifice spending money now so your Future Self can have more money later. You’ll sacrifice momentary gratifications to invest in education, health, and relationships.
Caught up in the short-term dopamine of the present, like randomly scrolling through social media, binge eating, or binge spending, seeking short-term rewards creates long-term costs. When you engage in short-term reward seeking that produces negative long-term consequences,
Everything you do is either a cost to or an investment in your Future Self. Costs put your Future Self deeper in debt. Investments make your Future Self wealthier.
put yourself in the shoes of your Future Self five years from now. Imagine what their life is like, and then write a letter, as your Future Self, talking to the current you. Have your Future Self describe what their life is like.
The 4th Threat to your Future Self is not being connected to them. You will not be able to proactively create the life you want if you’re not connected to your Future Self.
To exit the rat race of day-to-day mindset requires a shift in your focus. Connect to a bigger future. If you get serious, and started investing and learning, where could you be in five years?
The way to slow time down and really make progress is to lift your gaze and begin thinking much bigger and further out.
Develop goals that are five years out, and prioritize those big goals before the urgent daily battles.
Threat #5 is thinking far too short term and urgent in your goals, and way too small about your future. This is a formula to exhaust extreme effort but stay in the same place.
What opportunities are you missing simply because you’re so focused on your urgent and small goals?43,44 Suffering from inattentional blindness, people are so busy looking for bronze coins that they can’t see the gold coins all around them. You get what you’re looking for. You see what you’re currently measuring. All the while, there are insane, life-changing opportunities sitting in front of your face right now. Gold coins.
Trade inattentional blindness for selective attention. Clarify what you’re looking for, and you’ll see it everywhere. What was once hidden in plain sight will become radically obvious. You see what you’re looking for. Make your vision absurdly bigger and you’ll immediately see pathways to get there. Dan Sullivan said, “Our eyes only see and our ears only hear what our brain is looking for.”
You need to aim beyond what you are capable of.
Make your vision of where you want to be a reality. Nothing is impossible.46
“Never take advice from someone you wouldn’t trade places with.”
Being outside the arena means you’re overthinking, caught in paralysis by analysis. You’re letting fear win.
The psychological definition of courage is to proactively pursue a noble and worthwhile goal involving risk.
Spectators are caught in paralysis by analysis, fear, and decision fatigue. The longer you wait to enter your arena, the more you limit your Future Self.
Being in the arena means you’re finally facing and embracing reality. In the arena, you’re no longer afraid of reality because it has become your instructor. Eventually, as your Future Self you’ll be able to shape reality.
As your focus and long-term vision are squeezed out by short-term wins, the original singular goal becomes muddled and distracted.
Author and philosopher Robert Brault said, “We are kept from our goal not by obstacles, but by a clear path to a lesser goal.”54 The more successful you become, the more lesser goals present themselves. The more opportunities and quick wins come your way, the greater the need to continually update your vision to filter out the 99 percent of nonessential traps to your energy and focus.
When things are going well, it’s also easy to get soft and lazy. You stop the disciplines that got you where you’re at.
As times get good, people become less focused and less committed. They stop having a bigger Future Self they’re driving toward. They get stuck in short-term dopamine loops.
With the loss of religion, communism eventually rises, diminishing freedom and progress.
when one goes down the other goes up; when religion declines Communism grows.”
Just like a business, when a nation takes on extreme levels of debt, becomes less productive, and is riddled with internal division, it is poised for a collapse.
If you get clear on your Future Self, and invest specifically toward your Future Self, you will become incredibly successful. You’ll experience the compound effect in knowledge, skills, money, and relationships. But with this increase in success, you will face surprising complexity.
Without remaining clear on what truly matters, you’ll become internally divided on what you’re committed to. As the Bible states, “A double minded man is unstable in all his ways.”58 Success is a massive threat to your Future Self.
In 2 years, 5 years, 10 years, or 20, baring fatality, you will become someone. The question to ask yourself is: Who will your Future Self be? That is, perhaps, the most important question any human can ask themself.
Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “If a man hasn’t found something he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.”
In the words of the historian Will Durant, “The ability of the average [person] could be doubled, if the situation demanded it.”3
After three days of peaceful mass protests, called the Power People Revolution, Cory was sworn in as the 11th president of the Philippines on February 25, 1986. She became the first female president in all of Asia.
There are Seven Truths about your Future Self. We all have a future ahead of us. In 10 years, 20 years, and more, we will become our Future Selves. The question is: Who will your Future Self be? What life will you live? What will you commit yourself to? As Cory did, you will find your Future Self is often far different than you expect.
We all change. Life events change us. Aging changes us. Learning, relationships, experience, success, and failure changes us.
All behavior is done for an end. Final cause is based on teleology. The word télos means “the end or cause of a thing.”10 According to teleology, all human behavior is goal or future driven, the means to some end. The goal or end is the cause of the behavior.
Doesn’t mental creation precede physical creation, to use Covey’s language?
Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Shallow men believe in luck . . . Strong men believe in cause and effect.”
Behavior becomes more intelligent as it is intentionally designed for ends.
“What’s critical is we know what we’re doing now and we know what we’re doing next, so attention can stay focused in the present.”
Focus on the goal right in front of you, and do that again and again, knowing these are the critical steps to the overarching goal of winning the game, and then the championship.
The core truth of humanity is that all human behavior is driven by goals.
The more intentional and proactive you become in your actions, goals, and thinking, the more intelligent and freer you’ll be.
Truth #1 is that your future drives your present. Human beings are intelligent to the extent they are intentional, conscious, and honest about the goals that are driving them.
Despite acknowledging major changes in themselves over the previous 10 years, people consistently assume only minor changes in themselves over the upcoming decade.
Most of us can remember who we were 10 years ago, but we find it hard to imagine who we’re going to be, and then we mistakenly think that because it’s hard to imagine, it’s not likely to happen.
People with a fixed mindset overemphasize and overly define their current selves, believing who they are now is their core self. Unchangeable and innate, their inner dialogue states, “This is who I am and who I’m always going to be.”
In fact, if a stranger could have a conversation with the person you were 10 years ago, and the person you are today, they’d be talking to two totally different people. Your Future Self will be just as different.
Dr. Gilbert’s research helps us realize that our Future Self will be far different than we expect, even without conscious effort on our part.
Your current self is temporary. This refreshing truth enables a growth mindset, where you’re more interested in learning and growing than trying to prove yourself. It creates a flexible identity, where you actively update and alter your perspectives, and continually upgrade how you think, what you measure, and what you value.
