Be Your Future Self Now: The Science of Intentional Transformation

by Benjamin P. Hardy

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.”32

Small things, all things. Take control of it!!

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.33

Even Dr. Angela Duckworth, whose research focuses on grit—a fairly individualistic attribute—concedes that grit is much easier to develop and utilize in environments where high performance is the expected norm.

Go where the target identity and standards are the default.

In transformational relationships, there is no keeping score. There’s a genuine desire to help and support each other. The purpose and approach of the relationship is transformation, which focuses on giving, gratitude, and growth.

Every time you see them the question is "what's in it for them?"

Connection starts with having empathy for your Future Self, just as you’d have empathy for another person.

Importantly, building a connection to your Future Self requires seeing your Future Self as a different person from who you are today.

Hershfield found a direct correlation between the level of connection you have with your Future Self and the quality of your decisions right now.

When I care about my Future Self, I happily invest in their well-being, situation, freedoms, and characteristics.

Forgoeing gratification today to get to the next level by investing into the well being of your future self.

As you invest in your Future Self, you are more connected to them. You love whatever you invest yourself in. You become committed to whatever you invest yourself in. Over time, whatever you invest in grows and compounds.

Liking, loving, committment grows the more we invest into ourselves.

Dan Sullivan said, “The only way to make your present better is by making your future bigger.”

More exciting future to lift your current self up.

The more you engage in short-term reward seeking, the fuzzier your long-term Future Self will become. You won’t be able to envision beyond the next few days, weeks, or maybe months.

The more vivid and detailed your Future Self, the more direct can be your process to get there.

Have your alchemy document printed and digital. Read it often.

Make your Future Self vivid and detailed by writing a letter from your Future Self to your current self. Choose whatever time frame you want.

From future me writing to current me.

It is a law of power, however, that the further and deeper we contemplate the future, the greater our capacity to shape it to our desires.”

50 & Robert Greene

Similar to that sci-fi movie, most human behavior is driven by very short-term goals including eating, paying bills, getting to work, getting the kids to school, rotating the tires, and brushing your teeth. It’s day-to-day living, or at most, month-to-month living with an occasional vacation planned in there.

Max future vision is just a month out.

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.

Lower livEx allows for lower need of high monetary emergency saving amount. Live below your means and save cash!

The 34th United States president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, famously said, “I have two kinds of problems: the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.”

Important isn't urgent for others. But do treat it with a sense of urgency for yourself.

You can work 80 hours per week toward a six-figure income or you can work 80 hours per week toward a seven- or eight-figure income.

From 2011 to 2021, he 10X’d his net worth from approximately $20 million to more than $300 million, creating a portfolio worth several billion dollars. Cardone radically elevated his vision.

10X the vision for yourself over the next 10 years. Forces more courage and bigger out the box thinking. Same thinking won't work.

Suffering from inattentional blindness, people are so busy looking for bronze coins that they can’t see the gold coins all around them.

Seek and you will find. Focus on doing what private equity billionaires did 10 years before.

Rather than ask, “How can I make $100,000 this year?” ask, “How can I make $10,000,000 this year?”

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.

Give RAS something to work on.

You need to develop a complete disregard for where your abilities end.

If you think you’re unable to be on the cover of Time magazine, make it your business to be there. Make your vision of where you want to be a reality. Nothing is impossible.46

Dreams into reality. I've seen it.

No matter what you do, there will be bystanders outside the arena who criticize. They will doubt you.

You can nver pleade some. Who cares. Focus on those you are helping.

The psychological definition of courage is to proactively pursue a noble and worthwhile goal involving risk.48,49 According to Dr. David Hawkins, courage is the doorway to all positive change.

Courage starts change.

But the actions and behaviors at mile marker “E” were completely blind to me at mile marker “C.” I had to actually get in the arena to understand the landscape. My failures were my best friend. I learned from others in the arena who were steps ahead of me.

Failures as your BEST friends. They hurt you and tell you the truth. Only true friends do that.

But the actions and behaviors at mile marker “E” were completely blind to me at mile marker “C.” I had to actually get in the arena to understand the landscape. My failures were my best friend. I learned from others in the arena who were steps ahead of me.

See failures as your real best friends. They lay you bare and reveal the true you to yourself. No one else can do that. Then learn from other big players ahead of you.

I’m fine making mistakes because the mistakes I make now are much more important than the mistakes I made a few years ago. I’m playing a much bigger game than I was a few years ago. The stakes are a lot higher. The love is deeper. Every victory is more rewarding.

At peace with mistakes. Always there where learning is happening. New mistakes. Bugger ones. Bring it on.

The longer you wait to enter your arena, the more you limit your Future Self.

Manage the worst case and get acting!

Success Disease makes people begin to forego to different degrees the effort, focus, discipline, teaching, teamwork, learning, and attention to detail that brought ‘mastery’ and its progeny, success.”

Don't let success disease pollute your mind. "I ain't done shit yet" mindset.

Success is difficult to handle. Most people self-destruct once things start getting good. Dr. Gay Hendricks developed a concept he calls “the upper limit problem,” which he uses to explain how success can backfire.

Each of us has an inner thermostat setting that determines how much love, success, and creativity we allow ourselves to enjoy. When we exceed our inner thermostat setting, we will often do something to sabotage ourselves, causing us to drop back into the old, familiar zone where we feel secure.

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.

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.

Yet, according to the Durants, this is where the downfall begins. From their perspective, to thrive in a societal group, individual members must obey a moral code that supports the group interests over individual interests. This can be difficult for people whose individualistic evolution runs deep. Without religion to provide meaning for living a moral code, people have less reason to do what’s best for the group.

The tech/industrial stage in societies.

Communism fails, according to the Durants, because inequality between humans is a fundamental aspect of nature and society. Communism seeks to force equality, and thus destroys freedom and autonomy.

The Durants explain: Heaven and utopia are buckets in a well: when one goes down the other goes up; when religion declines Communism grows.”

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

At the end of her term, she quietly returned to civilian life. Following her death on August 1, 2009, monuments and public landmarks were named in her honor throughout the Philippines. Known in her country as the Mother of Democracy, Cory Aquino had become her Future Self. She had fulfilled her purpose.

As Cory did, you will find your Future Self is often far different than you expect. Cory could have never predicted she would succeed Marcos as the first female president.

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. Health, for example, is the end of walking, losing weight, seeing the doctor, and eating well.

We all are doing something to get an outcome.

build a business, write a book, or ride a bike? Is it by design or random chance? Isn’t the goal what determines the process?

Goal first, processes follow thereafter.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Shallow men believe in luck . . . Strong men believe in cause and effect.”

Luck exists but consequential luck doesn't exist without deliebrate practice to be able to exploit the opportunity.

A definite view, by contrast, favors firm convictions. Instead of pursuing many-sided mediocrity and calling it “wellroundedness,” a definite person determines the one best thing to do and then does it.

via Peter Thiel

Atomic Habits we should “forget about setting goals” and that “true long-term thinking is goal-less thinking.”12 Yet when asked directly, he ultimately conceded that goals are the driver.

Target first then the identity needed identified. This tells us what we need to do. But goals come first.

Specific goals are a vital flow trigger. As Steven Kotler, one of the leading experts on flow, stated, “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.”17

Specific boundaries allow us to flow.

In order to be in a flow state, it is essential to focus on one goal at a time. Multitasking interrupts flow.

One focus at a time.