Be Your Future Self Now

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7 Truths About Your Future Self

You can expect the future to take a definite form or you can treat it as hazily uncertain. If you treat your future as something definite, it makes sense to understand it in advance and to work to shape it. But if you expect an indefinite future ruled by randomness, you will give up trying to master it.

Behavior becomes more intelligent as it is intentionally designed for ends.

Without specified goals, flow is extremely difficult because goals create constraints within which a person can focus. If you have absolutely no objectives for your day, how could you possibly know where to focus?

Truth #1 is that your future drives your present.

Everything you do has a consequence for better or worse. Everything you do has a compounding consequence. Your Future Self is the exaggerated result of your current decisions.

Reactive behavior is usually costly. The more you put your Future Self in debt in terms of health, learning, finances, and time, the more painful and costly will be the eventual toll. There will be a lot of interest to pay if you continually accrue debt.

Continually position your Future Self for freedom of time, money, relationships, and overall sense of purpose.

This is how you proactively change and elevate your vision. By upgrading your vision, you change your identity and behavior. The more you invest, the more committed you’ll be. The more you invest, the bigger your vision will be. Invest your time, your money, and your talents.

Commitment to Future Self means investing in loss or failure here and now to accelerate progress. The more willing you are to invest in momentary loss and pain directed at a goal, the faster you’ll adapt to the level of your Future Self.

Truth #5 is that failing as your Future Self is better than succeeding as your current self. This Truth pairs with Threat #6, that being outside the arena will prevent you from learning and progressing.

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.

SUCCESS IS ACHIEVED BY BEING TRUE TO YOUR FUTURE SELF, NOTHING ELSE

success can only be accomplished by being true to your desired Future Self. Anything less than being true to your Future Self is failure. As you evolve, your view of your Future Self will evolve. Then you’ll have a choice, stay on the old path or the new?

Hardy, Benjamin P. . Be Your Future Self Now (p. 112). Hay House. Kindle Edition.

7 Steps to Being Your Future Self

Define for yourself a contextual purpose that you believe to be the absolute most important thing you could do right now.

Given your current context, what is the absolute most important thing you could achieve or realize right now? What is the next level that would be utterly amazing to achieve?

Clarifying your contextual purpose involves three key items:
Connect with your long-term Future Self 
Clarify your contextual purpose through your three major priorities 
Set massive 12-month targets based on your three priorities

Connecting with your long-term Future Self is essential to quality decisions in the present. The further out you imagine and connect, the more informed and strategic you can be.

After connecting to your long-term Future Self, the next step is to clarify the most important objective you could accomplish now. This is your contextual purpose.

You define your contextual purpose through a refined set of objectives. These priorities are what you believe are absolutely most important to you and your Future Self.

ELEVATE FROM NEEDING TO WANTING TO KNOWING

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. Be, then do, then have.

When you know something is yours, you act differently than if you don’t know. A salesperson who knows they are going to make a sale behaves differently than the salesperson who wants to make a sale.

Your behavior follows your identity. The scientific definition of identity is “a well-organized conception of the self, consisting of values and beliefs to which the individual is solidly committed.”

As you align your identity with your Future Self, fully accepting the truth of it, then you act as your Future Self. Dr. Stephen Covey said, “To know and not to do is really not to know.”

You get in life what you ask for. Sometimes, you’ve got to be persistent in your asking.

When you ask directly and clearly for exactly what you want, what you want will come to you. I’m really glad I asked Lauren to go on that first date. I’m glad I kept asking, even when, for a while, she was not interested.

Your Future Self compounds in whatever directions you decide and focus. The simpler and clearer your Future Self, the more focused you’ll be now.

Automate

To get where you want to go faster and easier, automate and systemize your Future Self. Implementing strategic systems frees up your conscious mind to focus, play, and plan. Automation ensures consistency of results.

Business strategist Eben Pagan calls this inevitability thinking, which he defines as, “thinking and acting as if what you are doing is a forgone conclusion because you set up the conditions for it to happen.”

Design your system around your Future Self.

System design means you make routines as friction-free and automatic as possible to achieve your goals. Impose friction or barriers where you want to avoid unwanted outcomes. Where can you make one change that creates an ongoing desired effect?

How can you better systemize your desired Future Self? What could you simplify and eliminate from your life, to free yourself from decision fatigue and lesser goals? What barriers and filters could you create to protect your time and attention? What could you automate, such as a weekly investing strategy? Where could you find a who to handle some of the hows that are outside your zone of genius?

Schedule Your Future Self

Dan’s 4 Freedoms: Freedom of time Freedom of money Freedom of relationship Freedom of purpose24

Your time is the clearest indicator of your commitment. You can’t hide how you spend your time. To improve freedom of money, relationships, and purpose, own your Freedom of Time. To have freedom of time, take ownership of your schedule. Prioritize what matters most, and eliminate what does not. The more you take ownership of your time and attention, the simpler and easier to realize your Future Self. If, however, your time is continually overrun with lesser goals and other people’s agendas, then your desired Future Self will be frustrated. There are two fundamental ways to approach time: Either it’s something outside of you that you cannot control, or it’s something within you that you fully control.

Aggressively complete imperfect work

Quit your lesser goals. Quit anything that isn’t taking you closer to the mountain. Don’t stick with something just because your former self invested in it. Quit everything that isn’t living as your Future Self.

Consistently shipping is what enables you to get to your best work. Shipping keeps you going.

“If you’re planning to do something with your life, if you have a 10-year plan of how to get there, you should ask: why can’t you do this in 6 months?” —Peter Theil

“Ship often. Ship lousy stuff, but ship. Ship constantly. Skip meetings. Often. Skip them with impunity. Ship.” —Seth Godin

“Real artists ship.”

Real Creatives Ship - April 12, 2023 @ 1:55 PM

Shipping is about finishing. Done is better than perfect. To quote Leonardo da Vinci, “Art is never finished, only abandoned.” To finish, you release your imperfect work. You send your art into the world. You market. And you ship more.

Is shipping that important? I think it is. I think the discipline of shipping is essential in the long-term path of becoming indispensable.

Godin’s story and ideas bring us to the 7th and final step of being your Future Self, and that is aggressive completion. The completion of projects. The completion of goals and objectives. Imperfect completion. Consistent completion. The completion of better and better projects. To become your Future Self, you can’t stay outside the arena. Move outside paralysis by analysis in your head and enter into the arena where you ship your work.

Shipping is how you reach your Future Self. Staying attached to your former work or your former views keeps you stuck.

There are two fundamental principles for continuous completion. Apply these principles consistently to invest in loss and make exponential progress toward your Future Self. Parkinson’s Law: Work fills the space you give it. If you give yourself three years to complete something, completion will take three years. If you give yourself three months, there’s probably a pathway. The 80 Percent Rule: Done is better than perfect. Dan Sullivan explained, “Eighty percent gets results, while 100 percent is still thinking about it.”

Perfectionism leads to procrastination. “Eighty percent gets results.”

Prolific is better than perfect. The more you make completion a way of life, the more you become your Future Self. Eighty percent to your current self is beyond anything your former self could ever do. Eighty percent to your Future Self will be beyond anything your current self could do. Confidence comes from completion. Completion requires commitment. Anyone can start, but few finish. The further you go, the less competition there will be. Most people succumbed to their lesser goals and gave up a long time ago. Every step you take toward your Future Self puts you in rarer air. Everything you complete teaches you something you’ll use for the next project. Become a master of completing and shipping. If you don’t, then your Future Self will be an idea but not a fact.

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