Speaker 1: The obstacle is what transforms you. Going through the obstacle
Speaker 1: is what takes you from who you are now to
Speaker 1: becoming a future self that's radically wiser, more capable.
Speaker 2: Wow, welcome to the one you feed Throughout time. Great
Speaker 2: thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have.
Speaker 2: Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what
Speaker 2: you think ring true, and yet for many of us,
Speaker 2: our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity,
Speaker 2: self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't
Speaker 2: have instead of what we do. We think things that
Speaker 2: hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
Speaker 2: just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent,
Speaker 2: and creative effort to make a life worth living. This
Speaker 2: podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in
Speaker 2: the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. We
Speaker 2: hope you'll enjoy this episode from the archive. Thanks for
Speaker 2: joining us. Our guest on this episode is doctor Benjamin Hardy,
Speaker 2: an organizational psychologist and the world's leading expert on the
Speaker 2: psychology of entrepreneurial leadership and exponential growth. His PhD research
Speaker 2: focused on entrepreneurial courage and transformational leadership. Before completing his PhD,
Speaker 2: Ben's blogs were read by over one hundred million people,
Speaker 2: and he's the author of six books, including the one
Speaker 2: discussed here, Be Yourself Now, The Science of Intentional Transformation.
Speaker 3: Hey, Ben, welcome to the show.
Speaker 4: Brother. Good to be with you.
Speaker 5: I'm really excited to have you on. We have attempted
Speaker 5: this conversation a couple times now, and technical difficulties have
Speaker 5: been our nemesis, but we have got it figured out.
Speaker 5: I'm optimistic this time. No hurricane in your neighborhood.
Speaker 4: This time around, we've recovered from the hurricane.
Speaker 5: All right, good, Well, we're going to be discussing your
Speaker 5: latest book, Be your Future Self Now, The Science of
Speaker 5: Intentional Transformation. But before we do that, let's start like
Speaker 5: we always do with the parable. In the parable, there's
Speaker 5: a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say,
Speaker 5: in life, there's two wolves that inside of us that
Speaker 5: are always a battle. One is a good wolf, which
Speaker 5: represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the
Speaker 5: other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed
Speaker 5: and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and they
Speaker 5: think about it for a second and they look up
Speaker 5: their grandparents. They say, well, which one wins, and the
Speaker 5: grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to
Speaker 5: start off by asking you what that parable means to
Speaker 5: you in your life and in the work that you do.
Speaker 1: So I think the easiest way I look at that
Speaker 1: is a lot of it has to do with attention,
Speaker 1: so like, your attention is the monster you're feeding, and
Speaker 1: whatever you pay attention to you create more of.
Speaker 4: And I also look at it from a system's perspective.
Speaker 1: According to systems theory and also chaos theory, this is
Speaker 1: where the butterfly effect comes in. Little things can create
Speaker 1: huge ripples over time, So essentially you become whatever you
Speaker 1: pay attention to. Even subtle things that you pay attention
Speaker 1: to over time can have a compounding effect where it's
Speaker 1: like in a year, two or three years, that thing
Speaker 1: that was small and insignificant actually took over your whole
Speaker 1: life and it became your entire character. So yeah, I
Speaker 1: mostly look at it in terms of attention that whatever
Speaker 1: you pay attention to is what you're feeding, and whatever
Speaker 1: you're feeding you're creating more of and becoming more of.
Speaker 5: I love that and as you were talking about that,
Speaker 5: it made me think about addiction and the way that
Speaker 5: something that starts really small, like in my case, started
Speaker 5: as you know, I'm gonna have a couple of drinks.
Speaker 5: I'm gonna try drinking with some friends, right ends up
Speaker 5: as you know, a homeless heroin addict.
Speaker 3: Like it's a small thing, but.
Speaker 5: Just little by little it really grew to be kind
Speaker 5: of an out of control monster.
Speaker 4: Absolutely.
Speaker 5: Do you want to go into your father's story? Would
Speaker 5: you rather just stay away from that?
Speaker 4: I'm happy to go anywhere you want to go, brother.
Speaker 5: All right, Well, when we talked last time, I'm you
Speaker 5: know you did bring up that addiction was what came
Speaker 5: to your mind and your relationship to it. When I
Speaker 5: asked you what your relationship to addiction was, was that
Speaker 5: your father was an addict. Can you tell us a
Speaker 5: little bit about what that journey was like for you?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Absolutely so for me, what happened was is I grew
Speaker 1: up oldest of three boys, and we grew up in
Speaker 1: a fairly honestly like, very conservative religious family. And what
Speaker 1: happened was my parents got a divorce and it shook
Speaker 1: kind of the core of what I thought was reality
Speaker 1: I thought things were stable, And I think that this
Speaker 1: is actually an interesting aspect of trauma that I've learned,
Speaker 1: is that with these kind of seismic events, for kids especially,
Speaker 1: it feels like you go back to zero, and like, honestly,
Speaker 1: everything that happened before that, in a lot of ways
Speaker 1: can be lost in like the chambers of your mind,
Speaker 1: and it can be hard to even remember things from
Speaker 1: before that in certain cases unless you do some of
Speaker 1: the deep work. But it feels like you start over
Speaker 1: from zero at that point. But yeah, my dad was
Speaker 1: surprised by the divorce, although it had been growing for
Speaker 1: a long time, and ultimately he just wasn't able to
Speaker 1: hold it together. In his deep depression. He got invited
Speaker 1: by a friend once just to go get some drinks
Speaker 1: and he said, yes, I mean, I think he had
Speaker 1: struggled with addiction in the past, but it was something
Speaker 1: he had kind of let calm and that ultimately just
Speaker 1: opened up the floodgates, and over time he was doing
Speaker 1: pretty much everything, and it was all over my house.
Speaker 1: Like by the time I'm like thirteen or fourteen, my
Speaker 1: friends and I are playing World of Warcraft in one room.
Speaker 1: My Dad's doing all sorts of drugs in the next
Speaker 1: room with a lot of psycho people. Like my house
Speaker 1: becomes this looney bin place where like the weirdo people
Speaker 1: are coming over and my friends are like, this is
Speaker 1: not normal, then this is weird. Yeah, and I just
Speaker 1: kind of have to push it all out. I'm snowboarding,
Speaker 1: playing with friends and barely getting through school. I did
Speaker 1: barely get through school luckily, and did finish high school
Speaker 1: and then ended up preparing to go on a church mission.
Speaker 1: I felt like for me that was kind of a
Speaker 1: way to start over. My younger brother ended up joining
Speaker 1: the Marines, and so I kind of wanted a way
Speaker 1: to start fresh and that was the most plausible way
Speaker 1: for me. And in the process of me preparing and
Speaker 1: leaving on that age twenty, I did start to redevelop
Speaker 1: my relationship with my dad. We started to go to
Speaker 1: lunches together. For the previous few years before that, I
Speaker 1: had completely shut him out, Like he would come to
Speaker 1: my mom's apartment try to talk to us, and we
Speaker 1: would just stonewall him, just tell him to leave.
Speaker 4: Because we could tell he was high. Yeah yeah, and
Speaker 4: so yeah.
Speaker 1: He started to clean himself up and then I was
Speaker 1: gone for a few years on that journey, and he
Speaker 1: cleaned himself up during that time and ended up even
Speaker 1: becoming part of like addiction recovery circles. So it's been
Speaker 1: an interesting my younger brother's dealt with addiction. I've dealt
Speaker 1: with various forms of addiction, and so it's something I
Speaker 1: think about heavily.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yep.
Speaker 5: So you come back from that and your dad is
Speaker 5: in better shape. He's doing well, much better, much better shape.
Speaker 5: You guys work on repairing your relationship. Have you found
Speaker 5: that you've needed to go back and do any repair
Speaker 5: on yourself from what happened to you in those years
Speaker 5: or do you feel like you were able to kind
Speaker 5: of just be able to let it go and and
Speaker 5: kind of move on, or do you feel like you
Speaker 5: had some lasting effects from those years.
Speaker 1: Both would be my answer. I would say, while I
Speaker 1: was doing that two year adventure, I guess missionary venture.
Speaker 1: I did a lot of internal healing, doing a lot
Speaker 1: of missionary service, community service, having a lot of big experiences,
Speaker 1: a lot of spiritual learning. Also is a lot of
Speaker 1: self developmental learning, a lot of philosophical learning, and just
Speaker 1: connecting with other people with various backgrounds and so I
Speaker 1: healed a lot on that experience, let go of a lot.
Speaker 1: And then I would say I got home in twenty ten.
Speaker 1: It's been home for about twelve years, and basically I've
Speaker 1: just been studying psychology ever since. I had zero college
Speaker 1: credits when I came home. You know, I ended up
Speaker 1: going obviously through a PhD in psychology, although it was
Speaker 1: organizational psychology. My undergrad was in what's called philosophical or
Speaker 1: theoretical psychology.
Speaker 4: And so I'm still learning.
Speaker 1: I would say, I don't think anyone's ever fully recovered,
Speaker 1: but I'm always learning, you know, better models of reframing
Speaker 1: my past, present, and future.
Speaker 4: And I think it's a continuous cycle.
Speaker 1: I'm now in the process now as a parent, and
Speaker 1: we adopted three kits in the foster system, where now
Speaker 1: they've got all this baggage and I can see that
Speaker 1: stuff I thought i'd overcome is now coming out in
Speaker 1: different forms right as a parent, and so it's now
Speaker 1: a new way of going through a healing process that
Speaker 1: hopefully I don't pass stuff onto the next cycle.
Speaker 5: Yeah, parenting will do that for sure. I mean, my
Speaker 5: son is twenty three, so I'm at the other end
Speaker 5: of kind of where you are, But yeah, I mean
Speaker 5: it brings all that stuff up, not only in sort
Speaker 5: of seeing them and thinking about what's good for them,
Speaker 5: and you can't help it reflect well what happened to me,
Speaker 5: but also I just think parenting sort of constantly brings
Speaker 5: us to our emotional edge where we really learn where
Speaker 5: we're limited, and we come up against our limits all
Speaker 5: the time, and that can be overwhelming, and sometimes it
Speaker 5: is very overwhelming, but it can also with our minds
Speaker 5: oriented in the right way, it can also be an
Speaker 5: opportunity to grow and heal.
Speaker 4: Oh, yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 1: Have you ever read the books Sadharta. Yep, my wife
Speaker 1: heavily suggested I listened to that or reader. I listened
Speaker 1: to books usually, and so I listened to that book
Speaker 1: while walking the last two days, and I actually really
Speaker 1: liked what he said at the end. You know, in
Speaker 1: that book, obviously his son is totally rebelling against him,
Speaker 1: and he says he would rather have kind of the
Speaker 1: suffering and the sadness of that than quote unquote a
Speaker 1: peaceful life without it.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yes, I think that.
Speaker 1: That was kind of a cool model or a cool perspective.
Speaker 1: Is that obviously there's challenge, but there's joy. I think
Speaker 1: there's difference between joy and pleasure, and joy is a
Speaker 1: lot deeper, and it comes with suffering, it comes with pain,
Speaker 1: it comes with sometimes sorrow and disappointment, but you can
Speaker 1: still actually have deep joy, which is lasting in something
Speaker 1: you value, something of more of an enduring value. So
Speaker 1: I'm very happy. You know, I have six kids. But
Speaker 1: even when we first got the three kids as foster kids,
Speaker 1: when I was it was back in twenty fifteen, so
Speaker 1: this was the first year of my PhD program. This
Speaker 1: is also the year I'm starting out as a blogger,
Speaker 1: and so I'm taking on all these new things.
Speaker 4: Now we've got these three kids.
Speaker 1: I have zero idea had a parent, and I fully
Speaker 1: admit for years I probably inflicted more pain than positivity
Speaker 1: on these kids because I just didn't know what I
Speaker 1: was doing, you know. I mean, sure, that's me being
Speaker 1: pretty rough on myself. But at the same time, luckily
Speaker 1: we still have them, and we've still got years, and
Speaker 1: it's a long term thing, and things can transform. Relationships
Speaker 1: are the reality, and so you can heal and change
Speaker 1: those and so it's a beautiful process and I'm continually
Speaker 1: appreciative of it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it is.
Speaker 5: So over the twelve years you've been back, you've sort
Speaker 5: of had to continually reframe, you know, your relationship to
Speaker 5: your past, present, and future self. And so I think
Speaker 5: that's a great place for us to transition into future self.
Speaker 5: So talk to me about why writing a book about
Speaker 5: your future self was so important to you.
Speaker 1: So I was writing a book called Personality Isn't Permanent
Speaker 1: back in twenty nineteen, and I wrote that book because
Speaker 1: Number one, I just felt like personality was a good
Speaker 1: vehicle to talk about change. I actually think personality is
Speaker 1: very transitory. I think identity is also very flexible. But identity,
Speaker 1: from a psychology standpoint, identity is internal. Personality is external.
Speaker 1: It was interesting because when I was doing that book,
Speaker 1: I actually had a lot of professors who I had
Speaker 1: good relationships with. One of them, specifically, he lived in
Speaker 1: my neighborhood when I was at Clemson doing my PhD.
Speaker 1: And we would walk all the time and we just
Speaker 1: deep dived on various topics and we even still do
Speaker 1: every once in a while. But he was under the
Speaker 1: assumption and it was kind of the model for a
Speaker 1: lot of psychologists for a long period of time that
Speaker 1: personality is a very stable trait. You know, if you
Speaker 1: have a full on continuum from zero to one hundred,
Speaker 1: you might be able to move that dial by like
Speaker 1: five percent. You know, if you're an introvert, you're not
Speaker 1: going to become a full on extrovert. That's kind of
Speaker 1: the belief system of a lot of psychologists or old theories.
Speaker 1: But there's just so much new research coming out that
Speaker 1: proves the opposite of that. But also for me myself,
Speaker 1: I've just seen myself change intentionally and through healing. And
Speaker 1: so I was writing that book and I unexpectedly came
Speaker 1: across the research on future self. I'd never seen it,
Speaker 1: never heard of it talked about. It was kind of
Speaker 1: a small what they call a vein of research, a
Speaker 1: vein or a line of research. It was just small.
Speaker 1: But I came across it and I realized, this is
Speaker 1: a really big deal, and so it really informed a
Speaker 1: lot of that book. Personality isn't permanent, and I knew
Speaker 1: that my next solo book, I also write collaborative books
Speaker 1: on entrepreneurship, but I knew that my next solo book
Speaker 1: would be a pure dive just onto future self. And
Speaker 1: to me, I think it's a Lynchpin concept. I also
Speaker 1: am starting to see that it's beginning to spread dramatically
Speaker 1: throughout psychology. So I believe that that's a big chunk
Speaker 1: of where the future of psychology and even therapy is
Speaker 1: going to be.
Speaker 5: I really want to get into that. But the way
Speaker 5: you came to my attention was the book Personality Isn't Permanent.
Speaker 5: And you know, I've interviewed a lot of people at
Speaker 5: this point, you know, five hundred plus people, and so
Speaker 5: you know, we've had a couple people who have the
Speaker 5: personality is fairly fixed mindset. And where I landed on this,
Speaker 5: and I'm just curious your thought about it, which tends
Speaker 5: to be where I end up landing on anything if
Speaker 5: I think about it long enough, is it's kind of
Speaker 5: in the middle, right, Which is that not nearly as
Speaker 5: fixed as we used to think it was personality And
Speaker 5: there are some ways in which our personality also does
Speaker 5: remain consistent over time. So it seems to me that
Speaker 5: it's a little bit of both. And one of the
Speaker 5: things that I think I've really noticed is that personality
Speaker 5: changes more with deeply transformational things that happen. And maybe
Speaker 5: that's an obvious statement, but you know, I know, like
Speaker 5: recovery addiction, you know, the early years of that, there's
Speaker 5: a big change in who I was. I've had some
Speaker 5: spiritual sort of the lack of a better word, to
Speaker 5: sort of experiences or awakenings that were relatively dramatic, and
Speaker 5: I can mark a line where I'm like, I was
Speaker 5: kind of a different person in a lot of ways
Speaker 5: after that. You know where did you land at the
Speaker 5: end of that book about just how much are we
Speaker 5: able to change personality?
Speaker 1: Well, I'll say probably where I landed when I finished
Speaker 1: that book versus where I land now is probably two
Speaker 1: different territories.
Speaker 4: Ok, okay.
Speaker 1: And that's one of the beautiful evidences of even past,
Speaker 1: present and future self models, is that even who I
Speaker 1: am and how I see things now versus where I was,
Speaker 1: call it probably beginning of twenty twenty when I finished
Speaker 1: that book. I know I'm in a different place in
Speaker 1: how I see things than even two years ago, two
Speaker 1: and a half years ago where I sit with it now,
Speaker 1: And I like your initial answer in terms.
Speaker 4: Of both, There's a few things I guess I'll point out.
Speaker 1: One is is that a lot of psychological perspectives, even
Speaker 1: William James, who was the father of American psychology. He
Speaker 1: believed that personality was very flexible up until the mid thirties,
Speaker 1: and then in the mid thirties he said it blasted
Speaker 1: or it became. There is a lot of research. There's
Speaker 1: even a great book by a psychologist I think her
Speaker 1: name is Jay I forget her name. I apologize. The
Speaker 1: book is called The Defining Decade. It's all about the
Speaker 1: twenties and about how your personality is going to change
Speaker 1: more in your twenties than in any other period of
Speaker 1: your life. I like that, but it also fits pretty
Speaker 1: closely with William James's initial perspective research. Now there's a
Speaker 1: great book, and there's a great long study. It's the
Speaker 1: Harvard Men's Study, where they've followed a group of men
Speaker 1: for literally eighty plus years, and there's a great book
Speaker 1: that follows that study.
Speaker 4: It's called The Triumphs of Experience.
Speaker 1: And literally it's nice to see longitudinal research where the
Speaker 1: same group of people, even though they're call it an
Speaker 1: outlier group of people, these are men who went to Harvard,
Speaker 1: probably a lot of them Whiteman. And there's other longitudinal
Speaker 1: studies that look at people from different backgrounds, people of
Speaker 1: different ethnicities and things like that, And so anytime you
Speaker 1: can look at longitudinal research where it covers a group
Speaker 1: of people for decades is very interesting. It follows people
Speaker 1: in One of the interesting things about that book is
Speaker 1: that it shows that very nonlinear, non expected changes can
Speaker 1: happen in people's lives in their sixties, seventies, and eighties,
Speaker 1: where someone can be very outspoken and then become quiet,
Speaker 1: or they generally have a sad temperament and all of
Speaker 1: a sudden they become really happy, you know, maybe in
Speaker 1: their seventies or sixties, or they go like So, I'm
Speaker 1: a big believer that changes can occur at any time,
Speaker 1: and there's a lot of research now that's showing that
Speaker 1: personality will change with aging no matter what. But to
Speaker 1: your point, there are certain features that seem to endure
Speaker 1: in people, some of their quirks or general approaches to
Speaker 1: how they do things or temperaments. I think where I'm
Speaker 1: at with it now, I actually really don't know how
Speaker 1: I even feel about personality as a concept. But if
Speaker 1: I'm looking at a person more as a whole, just
Speaker 1: as a person, their context, their model for living, their priorities,
Speaker 1: how they make decisions, how they operate. I think that
Speaker 1: people change dramatically over time. Like if I was to
Speaker 1: compare myself to who I was in twenty twenty, and
Speaker 1: if you are just to look at my environment, my
Speaker 1: decision making, how I handle things, how I let people
Speaker 1: treat me, what I value, how I operate in the world.
Speaker 4: Sure you'll see some similarities.
Speaker 1: I certainly like still writing books and I like studying psychology,
Speaker 1: So there's certain things that are strong. But if you
Speaker 1: watched my day to day decision making or even my
Speaker 1: model for decision making or what I care about, you're
Speaker 1: comparing two very different people, and so that's more how
Speaker 1: I look at it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, this question shows up in lots of different places.
Speaker 5: You know. The heart of it is the nature and
Speaker 5: nurture question, right, how much are we born with? How
Speaker 5: much is our environment? There's all sorts of research about
Speaker 5: happiness set point how much of your happiness can you
Speaker 5: actually change? And at the end of the day, I
Speaker 5: think they're interesting questions, but they're also kind of ultimately
Speaker 5: not that important if you get the basic idea, And
Speaker 5: to me, the basic idea is there's a fair amount
Speaker 5: of things about your life that you can change, and
Speaker 5: you might as well, focus on those things. And the
Speaker 5: things that you can't change, you don't even necessarily know
Speaker 5: what they are when it comes to your internal state.
Speaker 5: But there's plenty of ways that we can grow and heal,
Speaker 5: and you know, to the extent that we can do
Speaker 5: that is sort of an intellectual question, but in a
Speaker 5: practical sense, it's just knowing that we can and then
Speaker 5: getting on about doing it.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm a big believer that I can change. Not
Speaker 1: only can I change who I am in the future,
Speaker 1: but I can change who I am in the present,
Speaker 1: and even I can.
Speaker 4: Change my past.
Speaker 1: That's a big aspect I think of a psychological view
Speaker 1: of time is that time is nonlinear. From a psychological standpoint,
Speaker 1: time is also holistic, which I go into a little
Speaker 1: bit in the book. But you know, the past is
Speaker 1: a framing, it's a perspective, and I may hate who
Speaker 1: I was in the past, and then in a few
Speaker 1: years from now, I might really have empathy and really
Speaker 1: respect who I was in the past. And so I
Speaker 1: believe that change is holistic at systemic, and that we
Speaker 1: carry it all with us.
Speaker 4: And I also believe it's practical.
Speaker 1: Like you said, if I even just look at my
Speaker 1: life right now versus where it was twelve months ago.
Speaker 1: I have intentionally made massive changes, but I've also overcome
Speaker 1: hurdles that I can see we're blocking me for years.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 1: Just one example is I think for a long time
Speaker 1: I've had a tendency of being more of a people pleaser.
Speaker 1: I think that a lot of people have that where
Speaker 1: I will bend over backwards to get certain things that
Speaker 1: maybe I don't even want, rather than just asserting or
Speaker 1: owning that this is what I want, this is what
Speaker 1: I value, and I'm okay walking away if that's not
Speaker 1: what I get in various situations, and I've watched myself
Speaker 1: go through an emotional transformation to get to that point,
Speaker 1: and it takes a lot. Most change is emotional work.
Speaker 1: This is why I actually one of my favorite concepts
Speaker 1: is called psychological flexibility, based on what's called acceptance and
Speaker 1: commitment therapy. Becoming more flexible and becoming more emotionally pliable
Speaker 1: allows you to go through some fiery emotional experiences by
Speaker 1: fiery ima and just like refining, they could be insane
Speaker 1: transformational experiences, but you come through the other side not
Speaker 1: only refined, but you also come out through the other
Speaker 1: side far more flexible and your options. Yes, and so
Speaker 1: this is what I enjoyed, watching myself change how I
Speaker 1: approach situations that are difficult for me emotionally, and then
Speaker 1: through the other side it becoming my new norm, my
Speaker 1: new identity, that I can now do this and what
Speaker 1: previously held me back is no longer a constraint.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I love that idea of a psychological concept of time,
Speaker 5: which I promise we're getting to the new book here,
Speaker 5: but kind of what you just said around this idea
Speaker 5: of being able to change how we look at things
Speaker 5: so much I think of psychology. What is really helpful
Speaker 5: about it in a lot of ways is that there
Speaker 5: are real skills that we can learn that enable us
Speaker 5: to see the world differently, to engage with it differently,
Speaker 5: to reframe things. I mean, there's a lot of really
Speaker 5: powerful tools my experiences. They take time, right, Reframing of
Speaker 5: a difficult event doesn't happen all in one moment. Sometimes
Speaker 5: it does, but more generally it's like I see a
Speaker 5: glimmer of light with it that I do and see
Speaker 5: beeofore like, oh, well, maybe I could think about it.
Speaker 5: Oh I never thought about it like that, And then
Speaker 5: it reverts into its you know, the way I've thought
Speaker 5: about it one hundred times. But then again, oh, maybe
Speaker 5: I could think about it just this little slow retraining
Speaker 5: And something you said in the new book. I did
Speaker 5: want to touch on this, and you just sort of
Speaker 5: brought it up, which is you say that a reactive
Speaker 5: narrative about your past stunts your future. Talk to me
Speaker 5: about the correlation of those two things.
Speaker 1: So back to an idea of a holistic view of
Speaker 1: time that as humans, time is not sequential. It's also
Speaker 1: not chronological. In other words, my past is not behind
Speaker 1: me and out there as an unattached entity to my
Speaker 1: present and to my future. But obviously my views of
Speaker 1: my past are going to impact not only who I
Speaker 1: am now, but also they're going to impact my own
Speaker 1: views of the future.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and from a motivational.
Speaker 1: Standpoint, goals are you usually categorized or couched in two
Speaker 1: different ways, either their approach oriented goals or avoid oriented goals,
Speaker 1: And all behaviors are approach or avoid goals. So if
Speaker 1: someone goes to punch me in the face, I'm probably
Speaker 1: going to instinctively react and try to gather way, So
Speaker 1: that's me avoiding getting hit. So that you know it's
Speaker 1: even subconscious, but subconsciously the goal in that situation is
Speaker 1: to avoid getting hit or you know, you can consciously
Speaker 1: think about what you want, even if it's just I
Speaker 1: want to go to the fridge and get a drink,
Speaker 1: and then you can walk there and go get it,
Speaker 1: and so all goals are approach or avoid even going
Speaker 1: and getting the drink, though could be actually an avoidance
Speaker 1: of doing your work right.
Speaker 4: You might get triggered.
Speaker 1: And that's why a lot of times people get on
Speaker 1: social media is because they're actually trying to avoid something else.
Speaker 1: But when you have a reactive narrative about your past,
Speaker 1: and why I say reactive is that it wasn't proactively reframed,
Speaker 1: you didn't approach it. To have an approach oriented manner
Speaker 1: towards the future, which is where you're approaching goals you
Speaker 1: choose consciously, you're actually consciously thinking about something you want,
Speaker 1: and then you're committing to that and courageously pursuing it.
Speaker 1: To have an approach orientation towards the future also requires
Speaker 1: an approach orientation towards your past, where rather than avoiding
Speaker 1: some of the painful experiences you've had in the past,
Speaker 1: you're no longer avoiding the past, because if you're still
Speaker 1: avoiding the past, then you're also avoiding the future. Usually,
Speaker 1: if you haven't settled things with the past or gone
Speaker 1: through a process of continuously resettling them, then a lot
Speaker 1: of your future is going to be about avoiding painful
Speaker 1: emotional experiences in the future because you're still emotionally raw
Speaker 1: from your past. And so usually if you have a
Speaker 1: reactive narrative about the past, what that means is you're
Speaker 1: going to have a reactive narrative towards the future. You're
Speaker 1: going to spend most of your time tiptoeing and avoiding
Speaker 1: around things rather than going through them, which is essentially
Speaker 1: what acceptance and compitment therapy is all about. You want
Speaker 1: to be proactive about the past, the present, and the future,
Speaker 1: and continuously proactive that you can approach your past and
Speaker 1: you can reframe it, you can reshape it, you can
Speaker 1: remodel it, kind of like clay. But I kind of
Speaker 1: look at reframing the past kind of like one of
Speaker 1: those lenses where there's like continuous kind of shifting and
Speaker 1: it just like slight color changes, and so like every day,
Speaker 1: I think I can have a slightly different and nuanced
Speaker 1: coloring or view or angle or meaning of my past.
Speaker 1: And it's never just a one time thing, but it's
Speaker 1: just a continuous thin slicing or just subtle changing. But
Speaker 1: over time it's completely not comparable to the past view
Speaker 1: I had before.
Speaker 4: So that's kind of how I look at it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, in the book, you say having a positive past
Speaker 5: depends very little on what events actually occurred. What happened
Speaker 5: to you doesn't matter as much as what story you
Speaker 5: decide to tell yourself about what happened. And I think
Speaker 5: the idea in there, and this has to me been
Speaker 5: one of the most fundamental liberating insights of the human condition,
Speaker 5: has simply been that there's an event and then there
Speaker 5: is my view of that event, and that in between
Speaker 5: those two things I create and assign a meaning. All
Speaker 5: humans do were meaning making machines. I haven't really figured
Speaker 5: out how you turn that mechanism off. I don't know
Speaker 5: that you can, right. It seems endemic to who we are.
Speaker 5: But recognizing that process and just just the question what
Speaker 5: am I making this mean? And what else could it
Speaker 5: mean for me? Just is a profoundly liberating question.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it's exciting to know that as people,
Speaker 1: we do get to choose the meanings, and I think
Speaker 1: a process of becoming mindful is observing yourself assigning meaning
Speaker 1: in the moment. Like, for example, if I'm having an
Speaker 1: argument with my wife, I can catch myself forming the
Speaker 1: story in my head by just actually listening to the thoughts,
Speaker 1: and I'm realizing, Okay, wow, I see what I'm doing.
Speaker 4: I'm painting her into a circle.
Speaker 1: And so I think you quickly can catch yourself in
Speaker 1: the unfolding of your initial meaning making process. But certainly
Speaker 1: what you're saying is great. That the beautiful thing is
Speaker 1: is that you actually do get to reframe the meaning.
Speaker 1: And that's ultimately what post traumatic growth, the whole field
Speaker 1: of that is all about. Is that you take what
Speaker 1: was a prior painful experience which was traumatic simply because
Speaker 1: you framed it in a way.
Speaker 4: That disabled you.
Speaker 1: That's really a key aspect of trauma is that something
Speaker 1: painful happened and you now feel like you're disabled in
Speaker 1: some way because of what happened, whereas post traumatic growth
Speaker 1: reverses that and it helps you realize you're actually increasingly
Speaker 1: enabled because of what happened, and now you're grateful for
Speaker 1: what happened because now you are more capable, You've got
Speaker 1: better perspective, stronger sense of meaning and purpose. You can
Speaker 1: now do things and see things beyond what your former
Speaker 1: self could have, and so you become incredibly grateful to
Speaker 1: that experience, and you continuously mind more gold out of
Speaker 1: it by continuously thinking about it, learning from it, and
Speaker 1: then using it in ways that stop you from repeating
Speaker 1: the past. I love that, and I think it takes
Speaker 1: being proactive again, using your agency to choose how you
Speaker 1: frame the past. There is a quote, one of my
Speaker 1: favorite quotes, and I'm sure I threw it in the book.
Speaker 1: It's from a book called Time and Psychological Explanation for
Speaker 1: those who really want to dive into the psychology of time.
Speaker 1: That's a pure book by one of my favorite psychologists
Speaker 1: named Brent's Life. But I don't know if this is
Speaker 1: gonna be a direct quote, but it's pretty close. He
Speaker 1: says that it's more accurate to say that the present
Speaker 1: causes the meaning of the past than it is to
Speaker 1: say that the past causes.
Speaker 4: The meaning of the present.
Speaker 1: And what he means is is that in any given moment,
Speaker 1: you're always viewing the past from the perspective of your
Speaker 1: present self. Your whole past is a reconstruction. It's never
Speaker 1: actually something you're looking at objectively. Anytime I think of
Speaker 1: a memory from my past, I could think about my
Speaker 1: dad punching a wall because he's upset right in an
Speaker 1: argument with my mom. But I'm always reshaping and I'm
Speaker 1: reconstructing in the moment what that memory is. I can
Speaker 1: never actually go back there. And so what Brent's Life
Speaker 1: is saying is is that the past is actually being
Speaker 1: caused by the present. Whenever I reconstruct a memory, I'm
Speaker 1: looking at it from my present self. And so he says,
Speaker 1: it's actually the present that causes the meaning of the past.
Speaker 1: It's not actually the past that's causing the meaning of
Speaker 1: the present. And so when you change in the present,
Speaker 1: you're going to change how you reconstruct your views of
Speaker 1: the past. And we see this in culture obviously, like
Speaker 1: when culture shifts, it then has a different opinion of
Speaker 1: what actors were doing in the past. And this is
Speaker 1: a lot of what cancel culture is all about. But
Speaker 1: we do it to ourselves all the time. Actually, the
Speaker 1: entire past is imagined. That's actually why framing the meaning
Speaker 1: and the story is very in your own control, because
Speaker 1: you're always imagining the past just as you're imagining the future.
Speaker 5: Does meditating feel like a chore, another to do list
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Speaker 5: one that lasts, I teach you why it can be
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Speaker 5: it comes to getting you where you want to be
Speaker 5: with meditating regularly. Go to oneufeed dot net and sign
Speaker 5: up for this free guide right on our homepage. In essence,
Speaker 5: what we were talking about a little bit was a
Speaker 5: quote by Victor Frankel that says, between stimulus and response,
Speaker 5: there's a space.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 5: It's a very famous quote. At this point, I'm going
Speaker 5: to use that quote as a jumping off point to
Speaker 5: another quote from Victor Frankel that you quote in the
Speaker 5: book that I think is very core to the future
Speaker 5: self idea. Do you remember that quote?
Speaker 1: Not sure if I remember exactly, but I know that
Speaker 1: in the front end of Future Self there are some
Speaker 1: very insightful, crucial wroncle quotes.
Speaker 4: That are very enlightening.
Speaker 1: So yeah, i'd love you to go into whichever one
Speaker 1: you want, and we'll go into it.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah. It says live as if you were living already
Speaker 5: for the second time, and is if you had acted
Speaker 5: the first time as wrongly as you were about to act.
Speaker 5: Now unpack that one for us.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I'd love your thoughts on any of this
Speaker 1: as well. But that one's really interesting because that one
Speaker 1: is an invitation to view your present self from your
Speaker 1: future self's perspective. So he's saying, just to again state it,
Speaker 1: live as if you had already lived this moment. Now
Speaker 1: the one you're in, you've already lived it, and you
Speaker 1: actually did act as poorly as you are about to act,
Speaker 1: and you're forced to essentially deal with those consequences. But
Speaker 1: now you get to redo it knowing the consequences of
Speaker 1: what are about to unfold, and he essentially says this
Speaker 1: from his standpoint, is the way to live a responsible life.
Speaker 1: I find that quote very interesting because it's an invitation
Speaker 1: to actually look at your present self and your present
Speaker 1: actions from the perspective of the consequences that your future
Speaker 1: self has to deal with. Yes, that your future self,
Speaker 1: at some point, whether in a year from now, five
Speaker 1: or twenty years from now, is looking back on this
Speaker 1: moment and saying, if I could redo that, here's what
Speaker 1: I would do. Yes. And I think that that's actually
Speaker 1: one of the most phenomenal aspects of a nonlinear view
Speaker 1: of time, is just that you actually can think about
Speaker 1: your future self and then use that to better dictate
Speaker 1: your present self. It's actually an invitation to be more
Speaker 1: intentional in the present. And I catch myself on this
Speaker 1: all the time. And I've actually been thinking interestingly about
Speaker 1: that quote lately. Even though I wrote this book almost
Speaker 1: a year ago, and even a book since, that quote
Speaker 1: has actually been on my mind because I've caught myself
Speaker 1: again letting the time go by where I'm getting caught
Speaker 1: in the thick of thin things. I'm getting the caught
Speaker 1: in busyness and then missing what's right in front of me,
Speaker 1: which is my family and which even my health, things
Speaker 1: that are important, and then realizing if my future self
Speaker 1: and a few years could come back and talk to me,
Speaker 1: what would they ask me to do? Where would they
Speaker 1: ask me to focus? Where would the things that I'm
Speaker 1: caught up and not actually even matter at all? And
Speaker 1: I'm putting way too much weight in stuff that doesn't matter. Yeah,
Speaker 1: one other thing that I love about this, and then
Speaker 1: you go wherever you want to go with this and
Speaker 1: what stands out or but literally getting in my car
Speaker 1: on the way here to have this conversation, I saw
Speaker 1: my four year old daughter's tricycle sitting in the front yard,
Speaker 1: and I was actually reminded of this quote because I
Speaker 1: just thought, you know, maybe if I was caught up
Speaker 1: in the moment, i'd be a little annoyed that the
Speaker 1: front yard's messy. But it's actually pretty freaking awesome that
Speaker 1: right now I still have this moment where these kids
Speaker 1: are four years old, and so I actually love it.
Speaker 1: And I think when from the perspective of your future self,
Speaker 1: the real things matter and the things that don't matter don't.
Speaker 5: Yeah, there's so much in that basic idea, you know,
Speaker 5: The first that comes to mind is a really simple question.
Speaker 5: I found that really orients me. And this is more
Speaker 5: when I'm getting, as you say, caught up in the
Speaker 5: thick of thin things, is I ask myself is this
Speaker 5: going to matter in five days, five weeks, five years?
Speaker 5: Just that question, Having that one at my disposal is
Speaker 5: so helpful, because nine times out of ten I will
Speaker 5: go this thing I'm about to get bent out of
Speaker 5: shape about just doesn't matter, you know. And so just
Speaker 5: as a way of fending off the moment to moment,
Speaker 5: day to day minor irritations, I found that to be
Speaker 5: incredibly helpful. And then the second thing is, you know,
Speaker 5: we've got a program we call Circle of Connection where
Speaker 5: it's really people going deeper and deeper into their spiritual lives.
Speaker 5: And one of the things we do is have them
Speaker 5: do an exercise that I first was exposed to from
Speaker 5: Stephen Covey into Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. And
Speaker 5: it is a very cheery sounding exercise called the funeral exercise,
Speaker 5: but it's a really powerful exercise because it's doing exactly
Speaker 5: what you're saying. You're fast forwarding to your death and
Speaker 5: you're then imagining, like somebody from your work, somebody from
Speaker 5: your family, one of your friends. All these different people
Speaker 5: from these different domains of your life are going to
Speaker 5: stand up and talk about you, and what do you
Speaker 5: want them to say? This exercise tends to do two
Speaker 5: things in people. One is it often bumps people out
Speaker 5: because they realize that what people might say about them
Speaker 5: right now is not what they would want. I mean,
Speaker 5: it's helpful to know, Okay, I want to change direction.
Speaker 5: But moving aside from that, it's more like, Okay, I've
Speaker 5: got from now till my funeral. Let's just pretend that
Speaker 5: I was starting from scratch. I've got the chance to
Speaker 5: influence what these people are going to say about me.
Speaker 5: What do I want them to say? And done right,
Speaker 5: It's not like what do I want them to say
Speaker 5: because I want to be praised. It's finding out, like
Speaker 5: you said, what's important to me, what matters the most
Speaker 5: to me? And so this connection between our future self
Speaker 5: and our current self, that's one way in which we
Speaker 5: imagine our future self looking back. But talk to me
Speaker 5: about why it's important to have this connectivity between our
Speaker 5: future self and our present self. What are some of
Speaker 5: the reasons that's really helpful to have it's huge.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's becoming a dominant theme and core finding
Speaker 1: honestly in psychology. One thing I will say as I
Speaker 1: jump into that and just hitting a final note on
Speaker 1: what you were saying before, is we're watching the Lord
Speaker 1: of the Rings series with my older three kids there
Speaker 1: now eleven, thirteen, fifteen, seriously, never even watched them.
Speaker 4: We're going through those with my kids.
Speaker 1: And there's a point in the Fellowship of the Ring
Speaker 1: where Frodo is asked to look in like this bowl
Speaker 1: of water essentially, and he's shown what his future is
Speaker 1: going to be, and interestingly, he's actually shown the worst
Speaker 1: case scenario if he doesn't succeed. He's shown like literally
Speaker 1: like the Orcs, like taking over the shire, burning everything,
Speaker 1: his friends Sam and Pippin and them like as slaves essentially,
Speaker 1: and then he's just explains that this is what's going
Speaker 1: to happen to if you fail, which is kind of
Speaker 1: an interesting, kind of doomy perspective. But I actually was
Speaker 1: watching that, I was thinking, I wish that I actually
Speaker 1: could see what would happen if I didn't fulfill who
Speaker 1: I believe I want to be, Like, I wish I
Speaker 1: could actually see and feel.
Speaker 3: And feel it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Yeah, Frodo was terrified of it and he did
Speaker 1: feel it. I mean, obviously that would be like a
Speaker 1: cheat code, right, Yes, if you could see the repercussions
Speaker 1: and the ripple effects of what would happen if you
Speaker 1: chose not to be intentional about your future self and
Speaker 1: if you chose not to be intentional about what's going
Speaker 1: to happen, and that even it is another example of
Speaker 1: how your view of your future dramatically and intimately impacts
Speaker 1: who you're being in the present.
Speaker 5: Interestingly, that just made me think of one of the
Speaker 5: core problems of addiction, which is that there's a line
Speaker 5: in the AA Big Book something along the lines of like,
Speaker 5: we can't recall with sufficient force the suffering and humiliation
Speaker 5: of even a week or.
Speaker 3: A day ago.
Speaker 5: Right, Like that would be the cheat code. If you
Speaker 5: could give somebody who's on the teetering of a brink
Speaker 5: of a drink, you know they're a month sober, and
Speaker 5: you could flash them back into some of those worst
Speaker 5: moments they would run from the drink.
Speaker 1: Or if you could flash them forward to what's the
Speaker 1: worst case of what's ultimately going to be?
Speaker 5: Yes, yes, but either yeah, that is the thing is
Speaker 5: that we can't imagine or feel with, you know, to
Speaker 5: use the line from that Big book with sufficient force,
Speaker 5: the impact of our actions on our future selves.
Speaker 1: And it ties beautifully with the question you just asked,
Speaker 1: which is and this is one of the things that
Speaker 1: the researchers on this topic have legged or have dealt with,
Speaker 1: which is why do people underpredict what will happen in
Speaker 1: their future? Because that is a core theme that occurs,
Speaker 1: is that people assume only minor changes in the future.
Speaker 1: As an example, if I were to ask the average
Speaker 1: listener on this podcast, this podcast may not be fair
Speaker 1: because this is an outlier group of people who are
Speaker 1: actually into change and things like that, But for the
Speaker 1: average person, who do you think you'll be in five
Speaker 1: or ten years? Most people assume that they're going to
Speaker 1: primarily be quite similar to who they are today. In
Speaker 1: other words, they think that their future self five to
Speaker 1: ten years from now is mostly going to be pretty
Speaker 1: dang similar to who they are today, when in reality,
Speaker 1: actually we radically under how different our future selves will be.
Speaker 1: As a simple example, just looking about who you were
Speaker 1: ten years ago, and if you gave it enough thought,
Speaker 1: who you are right now versus who you were ten
Speaker 1: years ago is completely different. How you see the world,
Speaker 1: what you value, your habits, your goals, your friends, the
Speaker 1: type of music you listen to, blah blah blah. I'm
Speaker 1: sure you may listen to I still sometimes listen to
Speaker 1: some of the same music. But one of the reasons
Speaker 1: and the challenges of this Daniel Gilbert. He's the Harvard psychologist.
Speaker 1: He gave a great TED talk in twenty fourteen on
Speaker 1: the subject called the Psychology of your Future stelf. He says,
Speaker 1: one of the initial problems and why people have this
Speaker 1: issue is because they don't imagine what will happen. It's
Speaker 1: not that we can't imagine, it's just that literally we
Speaker 1: don't imagine, and so we assume that the changes won't
Speaker 1: happen because we didn't take the time to imagine what
Speaker 1: changes will or could happen. And so a first step
Speaker 1: is actually just beginning to imagine. And that's a skill
Speaker 1: I think adults lose, and it's a playful skill that
Speaker 1: you can have. I think it's a great skill in
Speaker 1: terms of journaling and thinking, and obviously dreaming is great,
Speaker 1: but actually thinking about the context of your future self,
Speaker 1: what is it going to look like in five to
Speaker 1: ten years, actually lay out the context me for example,
Speaker 1: I got six kids, one of them is fifteen, So
Speaker 1: part of that context is that he's going to be
Speaker 1: twenty five, and so really laying that out and so
Speaker 1: beginning to imagine is an initial step of connection. But
Speaker 1: to your initial question, maybe just the why of the question,
Speaker 1: why is being connected to your future self so essential?
Speaker 1: It's right back to what we were talking about with
Speaker 1: the addiction and with the Frodo example, is that what
Speaker 1: the research shows is that the more connected you do
Speaker 1: get to your longer term future self, call it three, five,
Speaker 1: ten plus years out, even the eighty year old future
Speaker 1: self that Stephen Covey invites. The research is very explicit
Speaker 1: on this. The more connected you are to your longer
Speaker 1: term future self, the better and more thoughtful and more
Speaker 1: proactive decisions you'll make in the present.
Speaker 4: It's very ubiquitous.
Speaker 1: You're going to make better health decisions, better financial decisions,
Speaker 1: You're going to make better friend decisions. Like really just
Speaker 1: being aware of, first off, where you want those decisions
Speaker 1: to go, but also thinking through the consequences of what's
Speaker 1: going to happen and beginning to direct where you want
Speaker 1: things to go. It's the opposite of I guess you
Speaker 1: would say addiction, because addiction is a disconnection to the
Speaker 1: future self and more of a present self orientation.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's a present self orientation in a really destructive way.
Speaker 5: But you just led me into a question I wanted
Speaker 5: to get to at some point, So I'll get there now.
Speaker 5: You say in the book, you know, continually position your
Speaker 5: future self for freedom of time, money, relationships, and overall
Speaker 5: sense of purpose. So that all makes sense, right. We
Speaker 5: can all think of ways that had we done that
Speaker 5: in the past, we'd be in a better shape now. Right.
Speaker 5: My question in when we think about a future self,
Speaker 5: this is to me the future self gone wrong, right,
Speaker 5: which is I'm going to work for sixty years and
Speaker 5: a job that I hate, and I'm going to save
Speaker 5: all my money and everything is about what's coming.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 5: Either I'm afraid of what's coming, but my whole life
Speaker 5: is about there's going to be another moment and then
Speaker 5: I'm going to live. So how do we avoid that?
Speaker 5: If what we're sort of doing is on one hand,
Speaker 5: trying to make sure that our future self is in
Speaker 5: good shape, talk to me about how you think about that.
Speaker 1: I think it's beautiful and brilliant, and it actually cruxes
Speaker 1: or hits the crux of what I believe. The purpose
Speaker 1: of the book is just to hit the title one
Speaker 1: more time. It's literally called be your future self Now,
Speaker 1: and so the goal of the book is to think
Speaker 1: about where you want your future self to be and
Speaker 1: then ultimately to assume the identity of that person. Now,
Speaker 1: this would fit into what would be called like the bee,
Speaker 1: then do then have model which is the opposite of
Speaker 1: what you're talking about. What you're talking about is what
Speaker 1: Tim Ferriss would call the deferred life plan, Yeah, which
Speaker 1: is I'll be happy when you know, or I'll endure
Speaker 1: this terrible thing for thirty or forty years so that
Speaker 1: eventually my future self can go and sit on the
Speaker 1: beach when he's old, fat and tired.
Speaker 4: And you know what I mean.
Speaker 1: Like that is the one hundred percent the future self gone wrong.
Speaker 1: So there are extremes and there's nuance here. I'm not
Speaker 1: one for a deferred life plan, although I don't want
Speaker 1: to be reckless with my future. At the same time,
Speaker 1: I think you can have both. I think you can
Speaker 1: continuously be investing in a compounding future self. You know
Speaker 1: whether that's just on autopilot, having a certain amount of
Speaker 1: money that's going into a retirement nest egg that you
Speaker 1: know is building towards a future of freedom that you
Speaker 1: increasingly want. Having that process and those systems where you're
Speaker 1: continually creating a compounding future is great, but it's also
Speaker 1: misleading to it overly assume that you'll even be in
Speaker 1: that future. Right, Like you might be dead, you could
Speaker 1: get hit by a car, right And so if you're
Speaker 1: only preparing for the future and never actually living in
Speaker 1: the present, certainly you're gonna miss a lot of the
Speaker 1: gold that's right here right now. How I try to
Speaker 1: use this to move my life forward dramatically now in
Speaker 1: the present is is I try to assume. There's actually
Speaker 1: a great quote from Neville Goddard. He said, assume the
Speaker 1: feeling of your wish fulfilled and assume the consciousness of
Speaker 1: being the one you want to be, and then you'll
Speaker 1: be safe from your present state, is what he also says.
Speaker 1: So for me, I think about back to the Froncle quote,
Speaker 1: who is my future self? Not where are they? But
Speaker 1: who are they? Who do I imagine them to be?
Speaker 1: And who would I want them to be? And then
Speaker 1: also where, what where, and what would I like their.
Speaker 4: Life to be like.
Speaker 1: But ultimately, the usefulness of thinking about the future self
Speaker 1: is so that I can start being that person now.
Speaker 1: You know, back to the idea of the eighty year
Speaker 1: old self, it's really about using who you want to
Speaker 1: be to impact who you're being now. And so if
Speaker 1: I want my eighty year old self to have, you know,
Speaker 1: great relationships, I can use that, you know, That's what
Speaker 1: Froncle invites is to do. I can use that to
Speaker 1: immediately change who I'm being right now. I can go
Speaker 1: home and be an amazing father and be thoughtful about
Speaker 1: who I want to be. I can also stop avoiding
Speaker 1: situations out of fear, because now I'm operating more from
Speaker 1: the premise or the identity of my future self, who
Speaker 1: has far more courage, far more foresight. And so I
Speaker 1: think the major goal is to use your future self
Speaker 1: as inspiration and as the identity from which you can
Speaker 1: move forward in the present from a lot more of
Speaker 1: a powerful place, rather than kind of the weekend state
Speaker 1: which often people are operating from their past self. I
Speaker 1: think it's much more powerful to operate from your desired
Speaker 1: future self.
Speaker 5: I keep giving these sort of like little questions or
Speaker 5: little tagons. But one of them for me that I
Speaker 5: often do is if I'm sitting there and I'm like,
Speaker 5: I don't want to do whatever this thing is right
Speaker 5: in front of me, I think about my future self
Speaker 5: and I'm not talking about like my twenty year future
Speaker 5: second in like an hour, exactly, in an hour from now,
Speaker 5: because he's coming, right, I could feel fairly confident that
Speaker 5: hopefully in an hour, I'm going to be here.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: And if I spent that hour working on what I
Speaker 5: wanted to work on, true, or I spent that hour
Speaker 5: playing solitaire, that has an immediate consequence that guy in
Speaker 5: an hour is going to feel different. It's not even
Speaker 5: that an hour at the end of the day makes
Speaker 5: a huge difference, right, It's an hour of your life, right,
Speaker 5: But as we talk about, things compound. But it's that
Speaker 5: in an hour, how do I want to feel?
Speaker 4: Amen? Amen?
Speaker 5: You know, I just use that as a way to
Speaker 5: make myself exercise, as a way to make myself actually right,
Speaker 5: as a way to make myself prepare for the interview
Speaker 5: when I'm having some resistance to doing so.
Speaker 1: One of my favorite examples from the book was from
Speaker 1: Jerry Seinfeld, and he talked about night guy versus Morning guy, right,
Speaker 1: and he talked about how night guy always screws morning
Speaker 1: guy because he stays up late, and then morning Guy's
Speaker 1: got to wake up with four hours of sleep and
Speaker 1: go to work, right, And that's the present self paying
Speaker 1: little heat. And so for me, similar to what you're describing,
Speaker 1: one of the huge things my wife and I have
Speaker 1: been placing emphasis on is usually trying to get eight
Speaker 1: hours of sleep a night. And that's a form of
Speaker 1: I'm going to cultivate this for tomorrow's self, Like I
Speaker 1: love waking up having gotten a deep, impactful seven plus
Speaker 1: eight plus hours of sleep, and that was an investment
Speaker 1: in tomorrow rather than doing some form of mindless, low,
Speaker 1: very low grade consumption, you know, usually scrolling or some
Speaker 1: form or just whatever it was. Even if it was
Speaker 1: decently a decent quality of activity, the cost to the
Speaker 1: benefit analysis is quite low. And so yeah, I agree
Speaker 1: with you, and I'm big, big, big on morning routines
Speaker 1: for this reason is that I know that if by
Speaker 1: call it nine am, if I've actually done a lot
Speaker 1: of amazing things that morning, I will feel and be
Speaker 1: a different person for the rest of the day, I'll
Speaker 1: show up differently with my family. I'll just in general
Speaker 1: be more present because I put first things first. If
Speaker 1: it's like eight or nine in the morning, and I've
Speaker 1: already done my morning journaling, I've gone on a walk
Speaker 1: or something I've got, you know, gone to the gym,
Speaker 1: but I've also done some hard creative task, whether it's
Speaker 1: working on the book, and it's usually not that hard. Hilariously,
Speaker 1: when you actually just allow yourself to get into it's
Speaker 1: actually something that you can train yourself to just prime
Speaker 1: a flow state, and the hard parts just maybe the
Speaker 1: initial resistance of jumping in. Yes, But when I've actually
Speaker 1: just allowed myself to be proactive for the first hour
Speaker 1: or two in the morning and done something that's important
Speaker 1: to that idea of the feeling of the future self
Speaker 1: even just think about where do I want to be
Speaker 1: and how do I want to feel by seven eight
Speaker 1: nine am. I feel excellent when I've done first things
Speaker 1: first and I then operate excellently for the rest of
Speaker 1: the day.
Speaker 5: That's the reverse of Seinfeld. The morning guy is making
Speaker 5: the evening guy happy. He's like, you know, cause you
Speaker 5: get to the end of that day. You know a
Speaker 5: day well lived like that and it feels good. Right,
Speaker 5: you can sort of relax and go, oh, you know
Speaker 5: versus we all know what it's like to you know,
Speaker 5: piss away a day, right. I don't mean like do
Speaker 5: something we enjoy I mean like, as Tim Urban brilliantly
Speaker 5: wrote about, you know, the dark playground, right, Like, you
Speaker 5: know you should be working, but you're on Facebook. You're
Speaker 5: not enjoying it. You should be working, but you're on ESPN.
Speaker 5: It's not like there are things that would be fun
Speaker 5: in the right context, but in the context they're in,
Speaker 5: they have this yucky feeling to them. We all know
Speaker 5: what a day spent like that feels like at six
Speaker 5: o'clock at night versus a day where you really just
Speaker 5: got in there and did what mattered to you. I
Speaker 5: mean that that guy at six pm or gall at
Speaker 5: six pm feels radically different.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And the nice part is you can have both
Speaker 1: if you put first things first. Yes, you know, if
Speaker 1: you told for things first, you know, then by all
Speaker 1: means scroll on Facebook or do whatever form of lazy
Speaker 1: consumption you want to do. Yeah, I think you can
Speaker 1: have both when it's in that way. But I agree
Speaker 1: with you, and I actually think that The thing that
Speaker 1: ages people the most is when they're essentially having deep
Speaker 1: cognitive dissonance, which is where they want to be doing
Speaker 1: something but they're purposefully or they're watching themselves do something
Speaker 1: that's essentially taking them the opposite direction. You know, if
Speaker 1: you want to be working on that book, or you
Speaker 1: want to be you know, exercising, but instead you're eating
Speaker 1: the cake. It kills ninety percent of the enjoyment of
Speaker 1: it because it's going against the goal that you primarily
Speaker 1: want to be pursuing. Yes, and so you're essentially watching
Speaker 1: yourself shoot yourself in the foot. And I believe that
Speaker 1: ages people a lot.
Speaker 4: I really do. I believe that.
Speaker 1: That is more of an aging effector than even putting
Speaker 1: chemicals in your body. And I actually believe that you'll
Speaker 1: put more chemicals in your body that are bad for
Speaker 1: you because of numbing yourself. Oh yeah, because you just
Speaker 1: simply won't set your future self up, even in micro
Speaker 1: future selves, you know, you're who you want to be
Speaker 1: in the morning, Like, just by using your future self
Speaker 1: to just advance yourself forward and watching yourself do it well,
Speaker 1: then you can enjoy and you no longer have that internal.
Speaker 4: Regret or frustration with yourself.
Speaker 3: Yep.
Speaker 5: So what are some prac to coal ways that we
Speaker 5: can use this.
Speaker 3: Idea of future self?
Speaker 5: Like, what are some things listeners could sort of say,
Speaker 5: all right, a couple of things I can go do
Speaker 5: that are going to help me use this future self
Speaker 5: concept today.
Speaker 1: One thing I will say, and then jump into the practicalities,
Speaker 1: is that every one of us listening to this, or
Speaker 1: you and I talking, is being driven by whatever view
Speaker 1: we most hold for our future self.
Speaker 4: One hundred percent.
Speaker 1: The more you realize this, the more you can't disagree
Speaker 1: with it, which is just that we all already have
Speaker 1: a future self to which we've committed ourselves to, and
Speaker 1: everything we're doing right now is being driven by that.
Speaker 1: You know, you may be driving your car on your
Speaker 1: way to work, so that is the future that you
Speaker 1: committed yourself too, and you're just going through the motions
Speaker 1: of living it out. And so we're all being driven
Speaker 1: by or pulled forward by, however you want to look
Speaker 1: at it, by whatever future we've most committed to ourselves too.
Speaker 1: And so that's just a humble admittance. And I have
Speaker 1: to acknowledge that myself sometimes and ask myself, what future
Speaker 1: have I settled myself to either in the short term
Speaker 1: or the long term, that's driving everything I'm doing right now.
Speaker 5: So there have been points in my life where I
Speaker 5: spent my day, literally a day largely sitting in my
Speaker 5: office plane solitaire like that. I mean, who, in what
Speaker 5: way does that person that situation align with what you're
Speaker 5: saying about. I was committed to a future outcome. Talk
Speaker 5: to me about how that concept plays into that sort
Speaker 5: of behavior.
Speaker 1: So there's a few different ways of looking at it.
Speaker 1: One is that the bigger picture future you see for
Speaker 1: yourself allowed for that, right. So that's one is that
Speaker 1: usually you will not do things that the bigger picture
Speaker 1: future you have for yourself filters out. The future in
Speaker 1: a lot of ways is a filter. And so one
Speaker 1: thing is is that in the longer term you see
Speaker 1: that this behavior somehow fits with that future, even if
Speaker 1: maybe in your head you might say, well, my future
Speaker 1: yourself won't waste a day on solitaire. But the truth
Speaker 1: is is that if you're engaging in something, it's because
Speaker 1: you haven't released it from your future.
Speaker 4: You truly haven't.
Speaker 1: But in a shorter term, there was some side of
Speaker 1: you that either the day before thought to yourself tomorrow,
Speaker 1: I'll probably play solitaire, like seriously, Like in the short run,
Speaker 1: that's probably one of the things that you are most
Speaker 1: looking forward to doing when you woke up. Even if
Speaker 1: you have some gnawing sense of this is self defeating behavior,
Speaker 1: there's some side of you that places a lot of
Speaker 1: emphasis on that, and you look forward to it, and
Speaker 1: you have a lot of meaning to it, and so
Speaker 1: you were looking forward to it, and you've ritualized it,
Speaker 1: and so you were thinking about it long before you
Speaker 1: actually did it.
Speaker 5: Because what it feels like is when I would wake up,
Speaker 5: you know, back to morning guy and nighttime guy, mourning
Speaker 5: guy or nighttime guy the night before would be like,
Speaker 5: we're not doing that again.
Speaker 4: Tomorrow, Like, but then you do it. Is that what
Speaker 4: you're saying?
Speaker 5: Yeah, then you do it, you know, And then it's
Speaker 5: the avoidance that we talked about, right, A lot of
Speaker 5: people have an avoidance, and so you know there's some
Speaker 5: sort of avoidance going on there. So maybe it's that,
Speaker 5: you know, trying to look at it through that lens.
Speaker 5: Maybe it's that there's a vision of my future self,
Speaker 5: even if that future self of me is only an
Speaker 5: hour away, that thinks I can't do this.
Speaker 4: Well.
Speaker 1: How I think about when you bring up the avoidance side,
Speaker 1: is that the future you say you want is not
Speaker 1: something you're yet committed to, yes, and it's not vivid enough.
Speaker 1: It's not something you're pulled towards enough that you're actually
Speaker 1: still avoiding it. You're still actually avoiding that future either
Speaker 1: because you don't believe in it, you're not committed to it.
Speaker 1: If you were truly committed to it, you wouldn't allow
Speaker 1: this thing. And so you know there's something there that
Speaker 1: you're actually still avoiding. It could be fear, yeah, it
Speaker 1: could be a lot of things, but you're you're still
Speaker 1: avoiding that future and you're committing to the solitaire instead.
Speaker 5: What it clearly is to me is an inability to
Speaker 5: connect to my future self, right, It's an inability to say,
Speaker 5: my future self is going to feel this way in
Speaker 5: an hour, a week, a month. There's no part of
Speaker 5: me in those moments. Thankfully, this is multiple years in
Speaker 5: the review, although it shows up in brief moments. But
Speaker 5: I have strategies for working with it. But there was
Speaker 5: no part of me that would engage in an hour
Speaker 5: of that and be like, well, that was time well spent.
Speaker 3: That was really good, good work. It was dread.
Speaker 5: It felt like addiction, right, And the way addiction feels,
Speaker 5: as we've talked about, is I know I shouldn't be
Speaker 5: doing this, and yet I am doing it.
Speaker 3: And that feels awful.
Speaker 5: I'm thinking out loud here, But sometimes when I think
Speaker 5: about addiction recovery, we often talk about the consequence. There
Speaker 5: has to be a consequence, and that is true that
Speaker 5: consequences help us see like this isn't working. But I
Speaker 5: think the other thing that has to be there for
Speaker 5: recovery to flourish is hope. Right, consequence alone needs to despair. Right,
Speaker 5: But oh, this isn't working. But now I see something
Speaker 5: that might and I can actually envision a future self
Speaker 5: version of me that is better, as healthier. You know,
Speaker 5: those two things happen, and so I think that to
Speaker 5: a certain extent, it is the inability to connect with
Speaker 5: the futureself with and when you said sort of have
Speaker 5: any vivid clarity on what the future is going to
Speaker 5: hold and what about it I want. It's a state
Speaker 5: that feels profoundly disconnected.
Speaker 1: Yeah, people who are pretty deep into the psychological literature,
Speaker 1: they have a huge amount of respect for what hope
Speaker 1: is Basically, hope is to the psyche like what oxygen
Speaker 1: is to the body. It really is that important Without hope,
Speaker 1: and this is essentially Fronkles premise. Without hope, the psychology
Speaker 1: suffocates and dies, you know, which leads to the death
Speaker 1: of the body.
Speaker 4: And you can see it.
Speaker 1: If the economy doesn't have hope in the future, the
Speaker 1: stock market tanks, you know. And so you can equate
Speaker 1: that to yourself that if you don't have a hopeful,
Speaker 1: purposeful future, your own stock market, whatever that means for you,
Speaker 1: is going to tank, behavior is going to tank, etc.
Speaker 1: And so, yeah, I mean that was I think Frankle's
Speaker 1: core message of everything he taught was is that you
Speaker 1: need to have hope and a meaning to fulfill in
Speaker 1: your future in order to have a functioning life in
Speaker 1: the presence. And that was his premise for everything he did.
Speaker 1: He even said, you know, what man needs is not
Speaker 1: a tentionless state, but the striving and struggling for a
Speaker 1: worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. And so he believed
Speaker 1: that you need a future self that is specific, vivid,
Speaker 1: purpose oriented, meaning it's a goal oriented and that's where
Speaker 1: a lot of the research on hope has found itself.
Speaker 1: Is that to be high hope, which is the opposite
Speaker 1: of what you're describing. And I do it, by the
Speaker 1: way regularly where I'll catch myself, you know, numbing myself
Speaker 1: in some way in an avoidance of what I would
Speaker 1: like to be doing.
Speaker 4: And so we all do it, yea.
Speaker 1: So that's when you've shifted away from your future self
Speaker 1: and you're now not connected to your future self, and
Speaker 1: so you're now numbing your presence self with short term rewards,
Speaker 1: short dopamine. You're numbing yourself because you're not connected. And
Speaker 1: so obviously Francle's invitation, especially for people in dire situations,
Speaker 1: is you got to be connected without a why to
Speaker 1: live for, you can't bear the how, right, So I
Speaker 1: think that that's actually, honestly, the first practical step is
Speaker 1: getting connected to your future self and getting excited about
Speaker 1: your future self. That's exactly if you listen to Elon
Speaker 1: Musk as just an example, he says that that's why
Speaker 1: he wants to go to Mars is because he wants
Speaker 1: a mission that excites him so much in a sense
Speaker 1: of adventure that it gets him out of bed, wanting
Speaker 1: to see what's going to happen, wanting to see where
Speaker 1: it's going to take him, wanting to have something that's
Speaker 1: pulling him forward rather than something he's just pushing along.
Speaker 1: And so that's another model. In addition to the approach
Speaker 1: and avoid model of motivation is push and poll, which
Speaker 1: is you want to be pulled toward a future that
Speaker 1: excites you, rather than feeling like you have to push
Speaker 1: something along with willpower. I do think about my future
Speaker 1: self ten twenty thirty years into the future, and I
Speaker 1: also do surround myself intentionally with people who continuously trigger
Speaker 1: me towards a better future self. I'm proactively around, and
Speaker 1: I've done this for a long time. I'm proactively around
Speaker 1: people who are decades older than me, who have made
Speaker 1: really smart decisions. It's not hard, because we're lucky enough
Speaker 1: to be around millions of people, or even in our
Speaker 1: circle thousands of people. But we see enough examples, and
Speaker 1: if you're mindful, you can look at the examples and
Speaker 1: you can say, I can see that this person's life
Speaker 1: is the way they are because of certain things that
Speaker 1: they did, and we all go on our own path
Speaker 1: and there's no judgment.
Speaker 4: It's more just about learning.
Speaker 1: But I'm very intentional around being around certain people that
Speaker 1: then force me to introspect. I then look at some
Speaker 1: of my behaviors that I'm enabling or allowed to continue,
Speaker 1: and say, if I keep this up for another five
Speaker 1: or ten years, I don't know exactly what the compounded
Speaker 1: effect is going to be, but it's probably going to
Speaker 1: be many degrees off from where I'm actually wanting to go.
Speaker 4: Yeah. I mean, there's a great quote from JM.
Speaker 2: Barry.
Speaker 1: He's the playwright to the original Peter Pan, and he
Speaker 1: said that the Life of every Man is a diary
Speaker 1: in which he's keeping one while hoping to be writing another.
Speaker 1: And his humblest moment is when he compares the volumes
Speaker 1: what's actually happening with what he wanted it to be. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we can go off there, but I certainly have plenty
Speaker 1: of practical steps if we want to go into them.
Speaker 4: Wherever you want to go from here.
Speaker 5: Well, let's hit a couple practical steps. Because we are
Speaker 5: nearly out of time.
Speaker 4: Let's do that. So one is how I look at it.
Speaker 1: Obviously, it can be plaguing to try to set concrete
Speaker 1: plans for a future self. You can, as I said,
Speaker 1: I have every week on autopilot. A certain amount of
Speaker 1: money leaves my bank account goes into my investment account,
Speaker 1: and that's just gonna be an autopilot for a long time.
Speaker 1: Hopefully over time continuously change the amount that goes in.
Speaker 1: But that's me strategizing for my longer term future self.
Speaker 1: In terms of strategizing for a more practical future self,
Speaker 1: I really think that three years is a good round number.
Speaker 1: Certainly I'm strategizing for the beginning of next year as well.
Speaker 1: You know, we're recording this close to the end of
Speaker 1: a year twenty twenty two, so I do Obviously it
Speaker 1: can be practical and think about year legals, but I
Speaker 1: like thinking about a bigger picture, holistic transformation. I've seen
Speaker 1: that I can really transform my life in a big
Speaker 1: way in a two to three year period of time
Speaker 1: if I'm really thoughtful and intentional, and so I like
Speaker 1: having no more than a three year timeframe on specific
Speaker 1: goals and no more than three priorities. That was something
Speaker 1: that I've learned heavily through Jim Collins, who wrote Good
Speaker 1: to Great. He wrote B two point zero. Peter Drucker said,
Speaker 1: do first things first and never second thing second, because
Speaker 1: if you go for a second things, You'll never get
Speaker 1: the first things done. And so for me, I only
Speaker 1: have three core areas where I'm thinking about my future self,
Speaker 1: and those are the areas I'm If you think about
Speaker 1: watering a garden, you know, those are the areas where
Speaker 1: I'm watering.
Speaker 4: And so for me, I.
Speaker 1: Have three core priorities that I'm like, these are the
Speaker 1: few areas that are essential to me. Everything else is
Speaker 1: outside of these areas, So everything else is noise. This
Speaker 1: is the signal. This is where I'm going to pour
Speaker 1: the water on these. Anything outside of these is me
Speaker 1: watering weeds. So I'm going to invest all sorts of time,
Speaker 1: energy and attention into transforming these as much as possible
Speaker 1: over the next few years, because I believe that once
Speaker 1: I get there, that opens up additional freedoms that I'll want.
Speaker 1: But this is where I want to be focusing.
Speaker 5: So can you give us an example of one of
Speaker 5: your three core priorities for three years.
Speaker 1: I'll give you mine right now as an example. So
Speaker 1: you know, as we're talking, it's the end of twenty
Speaker 1: twenty two. So if I'm starting to think about where
Speaker 1: I want my future self to be and call it
Speaker 1: twenty twenty five, there's a few things that really matter
Speaker 1: to me. One would be obviously my family. So like
Speaker 1: my three older kids are essentially teens, and I see
Speaker 1: that lots of changes are going on in their life.
Speaker 1: Right my family will probably, just based on my philosophy,
Speaker 1: be a core priority, hopefully for the rest of my life.
Speaker 1: I believe relationships are important, but it's insane emphasis right now,
Speaker 1: even more of an emphasis like if I number ordered them,
Speaker 1: and if I was honest with myself, I would say
Speaker 1: my career even though I might have said my family
Speaker 1: came first, if I was actually thinking about actual priority
Speaker 1: with how I spent my time and my energy and
Speaker 1: attention going through a PhD, building a writing career. As
Speaker 1: I had to be honest, my career came first, even
Speaker 1: though I wouldn't like to say that to myself in
Speaker 1: the mirror. But I can honestly say that that is
Speaker 1: taking a back seat for the next three years and
Speaker 1: hopefully increasing over time. But family is truly like where
Speaker 1: I'm putting so much energy, and that looks like a
Speaker 1: lot of different things. You know, me and my wife
Speaker 1: doing therapy and even doing therapy with our kids, but
Speaker 1: also just having a lot better communication, having a lot
Speaker 1: more peak experiences, investing in their goals, taking them on adventures, traveling,
Speaker 1: also just doing small simple things, getting better at talking,
Speaker 1: and so, you know, thinking about where I want those
Speaker 1: relationships to be. When my son's eighteen, he's really into tennis,
Speaker 1: as example, and so like he wants to play college tennis,
Speaker 1: he probably wants to go on a mission himself in
Speaker 1: some way, and so helping him think about his future self.
Speaker 1: And so a big part of my future self and
Speaker 1: my top priority is I want those relationships to be
Speaker 1: in a great place, but also where do they want
Speaker 1: those to go? So I'm just constantly trying to put
Speaker 1: quality energy and effort into that and being aware when
Speaker 1: things are taking me away from that. That actually is
Speaker 1: one of the core principles and premises of this book,
Speaker 1: and it actually is a quote that I think I
Speaker 1: lace multiple times throughout the book, which is that we're
Speaker 1: kept from our goal not by obstacles, but by a
Speaker 1: clear path to some lesser goal. And so I catch
Speaker 1: myself when I'm in the lesser goals, which is where
Speaker 1: I'm watering the weeds, I'm in the thick of thin things,
Speaker 1: I'm outside my priorities, but I keep doing those things,
Speaker 1: and so I think catching yourself when you're in a
Speaker 1: lesser goal and it's taking you away from your core goal.
Speaker 1: So another one of my big three would certainly be writing.
Speaker 1: You know, that's even a bigger emphasis. In the past,
Speaker 1: I think, maybe even up until now, I was more
Speaker 1: interested in building a business and writing was the driver.
Speaker 1: But now way more emphasis on actually just quality of writing,
Speaker 1: growing as a writer, putting out intensely better work. So
Speaker 1: if I'm thinking about myself in three years, I'm hoping
Speaker 1: that the quality of what I'm putting out is incomparably
Speaker 1: better than what I've done to this point, and that
Speaker 1: as an author, that shows, you know. So those are
Speaker 1: just two examples, you know, of priorities for me based
Speaker 1: on the future self that I most want.
Speaker 4: One other.
Speaker 1: Just key point here is is that I love the quote,
Speaker 1: and this is a quote from a statistician. But the
Speaker 1: quote is basically that no model is accurate or no
Speaker 1: model is true.
Speaker 4: But some models are useful.
Speaker 1: So if you don't like the idea of having three priorities,
Speaker 1: that's just a model, throw it away. You know, you
Speaker 1: can do whatever you want. You can have a fifty
Speaker 1: sided future self if you want. I think that that
Speaker 1: would be less focused. But these are just principles or
Speaker 1: models that you can use if they're helpful.
Speaker 5: Yeah, give us the quote again about the goal. I
Speaker 5: think that's where we're going to end. That's such a
Speaker 5: great quote.
Speaker 1: Yes, this is from Robert Brault, seriously, a quote for
Speaker 1: the ages. But it's we're kept from our goal not
Speaker 1: by obstacles, but by a clear path to a lesser goal.
Speaker 3: That's really powerful.
Speaker 5: And I think any of us, if we look in
Speaker 5: our lives, we can see that the world throws so
Speaker 5: many things at us, and we allow so many things
Speaker 5: to get thrown at us that it's just so easy
Speaker 5: to get distracted into things that just aren't that important.
Speaker 5: Think about email, right, Like, the reason that I think
Speaker 5: most of us spend too much time on email is
Speaker 5: because it's easy.
Speaker 4: It's a clear path.
Speaker 5: It's a clear path, and it feels like you're doing
Speaker 5: something and it's easy. It's a clear path to an
Speaker 5: easier goal. You know, most of us are not in
Speaker 5: a position where we're going to get rid of it.
Speaker 5: But I spend way too much time when I'm mindful,
Speaker 5: just you know, that's the seventeenth time I've checked my
Speaker 5: inbox today, Like, how can that possibly be helpful? But
Speaker 5: it's exactly that.
Speaker 3: It's easy.
Speaker 5: It's an easy way to feel like I'm doing something.
Speaker 5: I'm not making progress on the big thing because as
Speaker 5: an obstacle, it's to that I'm choosing the easy thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and the obstacle often is the thing we're avoiding
Speaker 1: because we're not connected and committed to our future stelf.
Speaker 1: The obstacle is what transforms you. The obstacle. Going through
Speaker 1: the obstacle is what takes you from who you are
Speaker 1: now to becoming a future self that's radically wiser, more capable,
Speaker 1: just better. Is transforming yourself through the obstacles of climbing
Speaker 1: some peak towards a desired goal when your life is
Speaker 1: built around lesser goals, and the lesser goals are anything
Speaker 1: that you're pursuing either out of perceived need or just
Speaker 1: out of avoidance of what you really want to be doing.
Speaker 1: Perceived need could be I'm doing this because it's the
Speaker 1: job that's paying the bills, even though I'd really like
Speaker 1: to be doing this.
Speaker 4: That's still a lesser goal.
Speaker 1: You know, playing solitaire when you want to be working
Speaker 1: as you pursuing a clear path to a lesser goal.
Speaker 1: Jumping on social media and scrolling around is probably a
Speaker 1: clear path to a lesser goal, unless that's for some
Speaker 1: reason relevant to the real goal. When you're investing enormous
Speaker 1: amounts of time into clear paths to lesser goals, what
Speaker 1: that means is that you have a present self orientation
Speaker 1: and that you're setting your future self up for disaster.
Speaker 1: And it can even be in subtle ways where you're
Speaker 1: on the hamster wheel and you're putting forth a lot
Speaker 1: of effort, but you're ultimately not making a lot of progress.
Speaker 1: And the only way to make true progress is to
Speaker 1: go through the obstacle towards your goal and to eliminate
Speaker 1: all lesser goals, and to continuously do this, because it's
Speaker 1: a continuous process. As you said, the world is not
Speaker 1: going to stop coming at you, and you're also never
Speaker 1: going to reach a place of perfection where you're not
Speaker 1: going to try to avoid the truth or avoid what
Speaker 1: you really want. And so not only do you have
Speaker 1: an outside world that's coming at you have an inside
Speaker 1: world that you have to navigate to push those things
Speaker 1: away and to recommit continuously to what matters to you.
Speaker 1: One thing I will say just is is that when
Speaker 1: you actually use your future self as the model for
Speaker 1: making decisions on a daily basis, doesn't mean you have
Speaker 1: to be perfect throughout the day, but certainly for a
Speaker 1: lot of your decisions throughout the day, you're going to
Speaker 1: be making real stride towards something that's important, and continuously
Speaker 1: you will eliminate the daily battles, the daily worries, or
Speaker 1: the lesser goals that continuously ultimately keep you where you're at.
Speaker 1: Lesser goals keep you where you're at, whereas what you
Speaker 1: really want is what would ultimately move you forward. But
Speaker 1: every time you invest in a lesser goal, you've opted
Speaker 1: to stay where you're at. In most forms, you've opted
Speaker 1: to say, I'm not going to advance the position that
Speaker 1: I'm at, whether it's an hour on solitaire or whatever
Speaker 1: you're saying, i will stay here for now and I'm
Speaker 1: going to let the present self win.
Speaker 5: Yep. Well, that is a perfect place to wrap up.
Speaker 5: Thanks so much, Ben, I'm so glad we finally got
Speaker 5: to do this and overcame our technological challenges, and I've
Speaker 5: really enjoyed this conversation huge.
Speaker 4: It was a lot of fun.
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