Be Your Future Self Now: The Science of Intentional Transformation

Your time is the clearest indicator of your commitment. You can’t hide how you spend your time.

If you’re remarkable, it’s likely that some people won’t like you. That’s part of the definition of remarkable. Nobody gets unanimous praise—ever. The best the timid can hope for is to be unnoticed. Criticism comes to those who stand out.

As you get better at clarifying, simplifying, and asking, you’ll receive with increased swiftness.

Decisions and actions are best when reverse-engineered from a desired outcome. Start with what you want and work backward. Think and act from your goal, rather than toward your goal.

Some questions you could ask yourself are: What is the reason or goal for this activity? What benefit am I getting from this? Where is this activity taking me?

Sometimes we get discouraged and turn to inspirational writing, like stuff from Vince Lombardi: “Quitters never win and winners never quit.” Bad advice. Winners quit all the time. They just quit the right stuff at the right time.

As a species, we haven’t evolved to plan 20 years into the future. 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. [If you don't] think and strategize long term, [you'll be distracted by the short-term.] You’ll be caught up by endless distractions throughout your day. Your decisions will be myopic. You’ll cost your Future Self greatly, putting them deeper in debt in all ways.

Knowing the why is the deepest and most powerful form of knowledge because the why is always the driver of the what and how. When you understand why the stock market goes up and down, making informed decisions about investing becomes easier. When you understand why someone does what they do, their actions and behaviors make a lot more sense.

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

Dr. Stephen Covey said, “To know and not to do is really not to know.

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

Is your life the product of conscious choosing, or are you merely reacting to your environment? Are your surroundings governing you, or do you influence your environment?

Start asking, and you’ll start receiving. It’s startling how fast you’ll get what you want once you directly ask.

Your actions come from your identity. When your identity is rooted in current commitments, rather than your Future Self, your actions are weak and unaligned with your goal. The only way to realize your Future Self is to be your Future Self now.

In the classic book As A Man Thinketh, James Allen, wrote, “Men do not attract that which they want, but that which they are.”12 This is why getting to a place of knowing and acceptance is crucial. This is why you must be your Future Self now.

The 80 Percent Rule: Done is better than perfect. Dan Sullivan explained, “Eighty percent gets results, while 100 percent is still thinking about it.

All goals or motivations fit within two categories: approach or avoid. For instance, going to work because you don’t want to lose your house is an avoidance-driven goal. Going to work to get a promotion is more approach- motivated. Your reason or goal, whether positive or negative, approach or avoidance motivated, is the driver of your thoughts, energy, and actions. In all instances, humans act as we do based on the future we see for ourselves. That may be a future we’re trying to avoid, or a future we’re trying to create.

[For every thing you do, you can sleepwalk without awareness about your actions, or become more consciously deilberate about your actions. Contemplate whether this is a good use of your time by answering some honest questions.] Some questions you could ask yourself are: - What is the reason or goal for this activity? - What benefit am I getting from this? - Where is this activity taking me?

As the Proverb states, “Where there is no vision, the people perish.

What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.” —Viktor Frankl1

To quote Adam Grant in Think Again: To unlock the joy of being wrong, we need to detach. I’ve learned that two kinds of detachment are especially useful: detaching your present from your past and detaching your opinions from your identity . . . My past self was Mr. Facts—I was too fixated on knowing. Now I’m more interested in finding out what I don’t know. As Bridgewater founder, Ray Dalio told me, “If you don’t look back at yourself and think, ‘Wow, how stupid I was a year ago,’ then you must not have learned much in the past year.

Shipping is about finishing. Done is better than perfect. To quote Leonardo da Vinci, “Art is never finished, only abandoned.

We don’t like to admit this

We are kept from our goal not by obstacles

Develop goals that are five years out

A strategy he used for reaching his goals was imagining his Future Self as a distant mountain he walked toward. Every time he was presented an opportunity, he asked himself, “Does this take me closer to or further from the mountain?” If a particular opportunity did not take him closer to the mountain, Neil said, “No.

a clear and specific goal agency thinking. Belief you have control over what you do, that your actions matter, and you can impact the results in your life.10 pathways thinking. You see a path, have a path, or can create multiple paths from where you are now to your goal.

. You’re letting fear win. Take for example, the countless people who want to start a business, or write a book, or learn a language, or [fill in the blank] of any dream

100 percent is easier than 98 percent.” It’s easier to commit to something 100 percent, because once you’ve committed, you’ve eliminated the internal conflict.