Your vision of where or who you want to be is the greatest asset you have. Without having a goal it’s difficult to score.
—Paul Arden
After spending fourteen years in prison, Andre Norman went to Harvard and dedicated his life to helping other people. Although Andre’s transformation has been amazing and unexpected, the reason he went to prison in the first place might be even more surprising.
Andre went to prison because he quit playing the trumpet at age fourteen.
Looking back on his life, Andre came to the realization that quitting the trumpet became his life’s downward turning point, eventually leading him to quit everything else that mattered to him. Including himself.
“Bad people don’t go to prison,” Andre told my kids in our living room. “Quitters do.”
Andre grew up in a ghetto of Boston. He was surrounded by other troubled kids in a corrosive environment with basically zero shot of “getting out.” But by providence or luck, his sixth-grade teacher Mrs. Ellis saw potential in him. She was Andre’s band teacher from sixth through eighth grade.
She helped him start playing the trumpet and showed a love and genuine interest in Andre that he’d never received before. Over time, Andre didn’t want to let her down. He didn’t do much in his other classes, but for Mrs. Ellis he showed up. He cared. Over a few years with Mrs. Ellis by his side, Andre began developing a talent for the trumpet.
That trumpet was the only thing in his life that gave him a healthy and creative outlet. His trumpet gave him a reason to go to school. It was, for a time, a defining characteristic of his identity. Something he was building his future hopes around. Something that gave him a sense of self and purpose.
When it was time for Andre to go to high school, Mrs. Ellis proactively filled out the paperwork for him to go to a magnet high school rather than the district high school where most of his classmates went. This magnet school had a great band program and her husband, Mr. Ellis, was the band teacher. She felt that Andre could be supported by her husband and that band could be a vehicle through high school, helping him bypass the numberless traps all around him.
Andre argued with Mrs. Ellis about the decision. But ultimately, she won the argument. He respected her because she stood up for him, even against the other teachers who saw nothing in him.
For ninth grade, Andre went to the magnet school. But he didn’t exactly live out Mrs. Ellis’s wishes and expectations. In explaining the situation to me, Andre told me he had two personalities at the time. On the one hand, he was a kid who loved music. On the other hand, he was a kid who wanted to be cool, not nerdy.
He viewed the other kids in his band class as nerdy. He didn’t want to hang out with them despite loving band. He didn’t really identify with them, and he didn’t want to identify with them. Instead, he surrounded himself with what he perceived to be the “cool” kids, who also happened to be the troublemakers.
A few months into his first year, Andre’s “cool” friends got sick of seeing him with his trumpet. “If you hang out with ten basketball players, then you shouldn’t carry around a baseball,” Andre told me. “They won’t get it.”
“Get rid of that stupid box or you can’t hang out with us,” they told him.
It was a hard decision, but Andre caved to the social pressure. He threw his trumpet into a dumpster, and along with it the side of him that loved music. Without his trumpet, he now only saw himself one way: as someone who was cool. From his perspective at that time, that meant replicating the juvenile and criminal behaviors of his friends. His trumpet, which had once represented his “purpose,” was gone.
Without his purpose and the identity that went with it, Andre had no reason to continue going to school. It no longer fit with his identity or goals. He was no longer juggling two separate worlds, and instead jumped fully into the criminal behavior and persona of his social group. Over time, he began to see himself as someone who would hurt or kill to get what he wanted. And that’s who he became.
By age eighteen, Andre was in prison for robbing drug dealers.
During the first six years inside, Andre became increasingly hostile to those around him. Prison is a dangerous environment, and Andre fully conformed. He quickly learned that there was a hierarchy in the gang world. Your rank in the hierarchy is based on the number and type of violent acts you do.
“You’ve got to win the mob, like in the movie Gladiator,” he told me. “You need the crowd on your side. It’s all about presentation and personality. You’re only as good as your last fight.”
Andre began rising the ranks within the prison gangs, becoming famous among that crowd. One day, he carried knives into the prison gym with the plan to kill eight specific people and then anyone else he didn’t like. He knew he was going to get eight life sentences and so he thought, “Might as well add a few more on.” His goal was to rise up the ranks of the hierarchy.
At the gym, he wound up stabbing several people.
“No one died, just a bunch of attempted murders,” he told me, with some relief.
This act landed him in solitary confinement for two and a half years and added ten years to his prison sentence. But it also made him the number three guy in the hierarchy. And that’s what his goal and focus was, so the extra years in prison and the confinement were badges of honor. Symbols of his growing status and fame. Solidification of the identity he was creating.
His goal shaped his identity, his identity shaped his actions, and his actions shaped who he was and was becoming. This is how personality is developed.
One day, toward the end of his time in solitary confinement, Andre was out on the recreational field for his daily hour of “rec” time. During this hour, a friend told him that some of his gang had been stabbed in another prison during a riot the night before.
This news made Andre angry, and he immediately began conceiving a plan in his mind about how he could kill those in his unit who were affiliated with the riot. “White guys stabbed my friends,” he thought to himself, “so I’m going to kill all the white guys in my solitary confinement unit.”
Andre’s thinking was incredibly black-and-white, literally and figuratively. Because white people stabbed his friends, he saw that “white people” were to blame and had to be punished. “If Mexicans had stabbed my friends, I would have tried killing all the Mexicans,” he told me. Andre’s black-and-white thinking is reflective of traditional and common views of personality. We see people as types. We categorize them. We ignore nuance and context. We confirm our biases. We intentionally and subconsciously ignore what we don’t want to see.
There were seven white guys in Andre’s solitary confinement unit. All seven of them were also “ranked” gang members. Killing them would put Andre unquestionably at number one. This was his chance. His goals and vision were finally within reach.
“Once this guy stops talking, I’m going to go and kill those guys. Then I’ll be the man,” Andre thought to himself while listening to his friend recount the riot.
But before his friend stopped talking, something unexpected happened to Andre. It sunk in, on a more spiritual level, what the ultimate outcome of his actions and goals would be. The only way he can explain it is that he got a revelation from God. It was that profound.
God gave me my “Wizard of Oz” moment that day. At the end of The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy realizes there is no Wizard of Oz. It’s all smoke and mirrors. It’s all a hoax. Before that moment, I thought I was going to become the king of the world. Now I realized I was going to become the king of nowhere. This is nothing.
His storytelling friend noticed Andre spacing out. “Yo! What’s going on, man? You listening to me?”
Andre was totally in his own head. It was dawning hard on him that trying to become the number one gang guy in prison was like chasing the Wizard of Oz. He’d been on the yellow brick road for the past six years. Once he made it to the end, there would be nothing there. It was all a hoax. A shallow pursuit.
So much of his life and identity were flashing before his eyes. On an emotional and spiritual level, he was finally questioning the validity of his current goals. He was considering the ultimate outcome, and whether that outcome—his future self and all that entailed—was something worth investing in and becoming.
This moment, when Andre truly questioned himself and his goals is fundamental to becoming a conscious human being. This is an experience you must have as well. Think for a moment about your own goals and ambitions.
What are you actually trying to accomplish in your life?
What is the ultimate end of what you’re doing?
Why is this what you’ve chosen?
Is what you’re doing worth it?
Are you on a yellow brick road to nowhere?
And even if you are headed “somewhere,” are your sights too low?
Dr. Stephen Covey once said, “If the ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step we take just gets us to the wrong place faster.” The confidence you’re seeking, and the power you know is within you, cannot be unlocked if you’re pursuing the wrong goal.
Andre didn’t stab anyone that day. Instead, he walked back to his prison cell, sat on his bed, and thought to himself, “If I’m not going to be the king of nowhere, then what am I going to do?”
He had to rethink his entire life. His plan for the last several years was to be the king. Now being “the king” meant nothing. He needed a new goal.
Initially, he decided he wanted to get out of prison. He didn’t want to be there anymore. But then he thought to himself that just “getting out” wasn’t enough. Seventy-five percent of people who leave prison come right back. Lessons are repeated until they are learned. Instead of “being free,” Andre made his goal to “be successful.”
“Where do successful people come from?” he thought to himself. “They come from college. If I go to college too, then I’ll be successful,” was his reasoning.
Having grown up in Boston, he knew of only one school by name, Harvard. Sitting in his cell, rethinking his life and future after his Wizard of Oz moment, he decided he was going to go to Harvard.
Harvard become Andre’s new trumpet.
It was a goal and purpose worth aspiring toward. Like his trumpet, he could construct a new identity around Harvard—an identity that would guide his behavior, friends, and choices. He became fixed on that goal. It became his purpose for being. It gave him something useful and constructive to think about, work toward, and build a new life around.
That single goal, his new purpose, gave Andre a path to getting out of prison and becoming a new version of himself. It ultimately shaped in him a new personality.
It took Andre eight more years to get out of prison. During those eight years, he got busy. Everything he did was filtered through and fueled by his new purpose. When the why is strong enough, you can get yourself through and do any how. Andre taught himself how to read and write, taught himself law, and learned anger management. An Orthodox rabbi become his mentor, helping him understand his life and how it had turned out the way it had. He came to understand forgiveness, responsibility, accountability, and service.
“The rabbi taught me how to be human,” Andre told me.
Andre’s new goal created a new lens, allowing him to see himself and his environment differently. He stopped noticing all the negative forces around him and began focusing on the opportunities for progress toward his goal.
After Andre got out of prison, he became the poster child for men who leave prison and change their lives. He became famous. He gave speeches all over the world, even at prestigious colleges like MIT and Harvard.
He became a fellow at Harvard in 2015, sixteen years after getting out of prison. He has his own office at the university. They’ve funded his projects to reduce riots and crime in the United States. Andre is now an internationally regarded public speaker. He’s helped thousands of people overcome addictions and change their lives for the better.
Andre’s story demonstrates the truth of personality. Andre’s personality was shaped by his purpose. First his trumpet, then being the king, then Harvard. Each purpose shaped a different Andre.
Your personality is an effect, not a cause. The primary causes shaping your personality are your goals and the identity and behavior that flow from those goals. For most people, personality is a reaction to life events, circumstances, and social pressures. It isn’t intentionally designed. It isn’t questioned. It isn’t chosen.
When you’re intentional about where you’re going, then you can become who you want to be. You can get off your yellow brick road. You can let go of who you’ve been. Your past doesn’t need to be the ultimate predictor of who you are. Your behavior doesn’t need to be consistent with who you’ve been. You can change. Radically so.
Let’s break this down a little further.
Whether you realize it or not, everything you do has a purpose, or a goal, and these goals are what shape your identity. When Andre threw away his trumpet, continuing forward in band and becoming a musician ceased being his goal. As a result, he detached himself from that aspect of his identity. His purpose then became fitting in with his friends, which shaped his identity, actions, and circumstances. Over time, those things shaped his personality and future.
Your goals, not some predetermined set of fixed traits, shape your identity. Over time, and through repeated behavior, your identity becomes your personality.
An ancient concept in philosophy, known as teleology (from the ancient Greek telos, meaning “end goal”), can help us understand how this works. All human behavior is fundamentally driven by, and is a function of, its end, purpose, or goal. However, those goals may not be explicit or well defined. Jumping on YouTube to distract yourself for a few minutes has a purpose, even if it’s just to distract yourself. Paying the bills. Hanging out with friends. Even engaging in hobbies and interests.
Even the most benign, unproductive behavior is goal-driven. Procrastinating and distracting yourself has a goal, even if that goal is to numb yourself for a while.
Every behavior has a reason. Realizing why you’re engaging in a specific behavior is fundamental to becoming a conscious human being. Seeing every action you take as goal-driven allows you to take stock in the quality of your decision-making.
Every behavior is ultimately driven by an outcome. That outcome may be spiritual, economic, urgent, social, or emotional.
If you asked Andre why he liked playing the trumpet, he might say it was fun, or because he liked his teacher, Mrs. Ellis. If you asked him why he wanted to fit in with the cool kids, he wouldn’t have much explanation, except that he thought they were “cool” and wanted to be like them. Andre hadn’t really examined his goals and their effect on his behavior. He wasn’t conscious enough about where his desires or interests would take him.
As Socrates put it, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
Right now, we’re going to take a second to examine your life. We’ll start by examining what you’ve done in the past twenty-four hours, helping you see that everything you do is goal-driven. After that, we’re going to dive into the three fundamental sources from which our goals come.
First, pull out a piece of paper and draw a line down the center. At the top of the left-hand side, write down “Activity.” At the top of the right-hand side, write down “Reason.”
Then list all of the activities you can remember doing in the past twenty-four hours. Everything you can fit on that page, at least. Here’s an example of some of the things I’ve done in the past twenty-four hours and their associated reasons or goals.
|
ACTIVITY |
REASON |
|
Woke up at 5 a.m. to write |
Book deadline |
|
Listened to an audiobook |
To take a break, get myself moving, and feel inspired |
|
Ate lunch |
Satisfy hunger and distract myself from work for a bit |
|
Watched YouTube videos |
Distract myself but also to see if LeBron James won |
|
Worked out |
Get my heart rate going |
|
Went to Publix grocery store |
Get juice for energy after workout |
|
Talked to Draye |
Get things organized for a launch we were planning |
|
Recorded voice messages for an hour |
Improve the launch |
|
Wrote for a few more hours |
Deadline was pending |
|
Picked up Logan and Jordan from school |
Support family and be with them |
|
Went to Kaleb’s baseball game |
To support him |
Now, each of these “reasons” likely has deeper reasons. For example, although my surface-level reason for going to the gym yesterday was to get my heart rate going, if you asked, “Well, why did you want your heart rate going?” I’d say, “So I can be healthy and focused.” If you pressed and asked, “Well, why do you want to be healthy and focused?” I’d give yet another reason.
The point here is there is a reason for everything you did yesterday. Outcomes drove your behavior—outcomes you might not ultimately value. How you spend your time matters. It reflects your goals. It reflects the outcomes you’re seeking for yourself. Looking at what you’ve done the past twenty-four hours and then examining the reason for your behaviors will help you see what your goals are.
Why did you do everything you did yesterday?
What outcomes were you seeking?
Are those the outcomes you really want? Or is your daily behavior a reflection of goals that were imposed upon you, either by society, circumstances, a traumatic experience, or something else?
You will only be able to control your time and yourself when you truly determine what you want for yourself. Your goals must be consciously chosen and then fiercely pursued. Spending your days on activities leading you to something incredibly important, something you truly value, is how you live without regret.
Personal confidence comes from making progress toward goals that are far bigger than your present capabilities.
—Dan Sullivan
All behavior is goal-driven. But where do “goals” come from? Fundamentally, goals come from three sources:
Exposure
Desire
Confidence
1. Exposure. Charlie Trotter was an American chef known for his influence on modern-day fine dining. For years, his Chicago restaurant was considered the finest and fanciest in America. Dishes were hundreds of dollars, served in a classy, elegant setting. And, regularly, Trotter would invite groups of impoverished children to eat at his restaurant for free.
He did this hoping to raise these kids’ aspirations and goals. To expose them to a world completely different from the one they were conditioned to see.
He was opening their eyes.
Trotter received enormous criticism for giving underprivileged kids this rare and unique experience. “You’ll make them unsatisfied and unhappy with their lives” and “You’ll give them unrealistic expectations for what is possible” were the common complaints.
But Trotter didn’t care what the critics said, because he would regularly receive mail from the children themselves, expressing immense gratitude for the experience and inspiration. Often, kids would say they wanted to become a professional chef when they grew up, or that they would grow up to create an even better restaurant than Trotter’s.
Trotter was providing subconscious-enhancing experiences for these children. He was exposing them to a different way of living. He was providing an emotional experience within an enriched environment that opened the children’s imaginations to new possibilities that they had never before considered.
You can’t make decisions and choices if you don’t know they exist. Your ability to make choices is limited by your context and knowledge. When you expand that context, you expand your options.
Your goals are based on what you’ve been exposed to. For instance, where I did my undergrad in psychology, the program’s emphasis was counseling and social psychology. As a result, when I applied to graduate school the first time, I applied to counseling psychology programs, even though I wasn’t sure those programs were the best fit for my ultimate aims.
A few months after getting rejected by all of the graduate schools I’d applied to, Lauren and I went on a three-week sightseeing trip to China. While there, I met a man who was a “Leader” at Apple for the entire Asian region. He told me his job involved training, motivating, and helping the leadership and teams at Apple be more effective.
As I listened to this man explain his job, it hit me square in the face. He was explaining exactly what I wanted to be doing.
“How did you get into this type of work?” I asked.
“I fell into it in kind of a weird way,” he told me. “I actually have a law degree but navigated my way into this position. My boss has a master’s in I/O psychology, though.”
Interesting.
I remember vaguely hearing about I/O (industrial and organizational) psychology in an introductory psychology class for maybe five minutes. But otherwise, in my undergraduate program, I’d heard nothing about it. I did some googling and realized it was basically a perfect fit for what I was trying to learn and do.
My first time applying to graduate school, I was limited by what I knew. My second time applying, I had better information.
Those who become successful constantly expose themselves to new things. They travel, read books, meet new people. They prize education and learning. They seek to be surprised. They happily shatter their current paradigms for new and better ones—knowing that with better information, they can make more informed decisions. They can set better goals and aims for themselves. They can have better reasons.
Knowledge is key to setting goals. You can’t pursue something you don’t know exists. Exposure is the first source of goals. Whatever you’re pursuing right now is based on what you’ve been exposed to. Creating better goals—and thus designing a better future—requires learning more, changing your perspective, and opening yourself up to something new. As General James Mattis, the twenty-sixth United States secretary of defense, put it, “If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate and you will be incompetent because your personal experiences aren’t broad enough to sustain you.”
Read everything you can get your hands on. And then get better at filtering the best books from the rest. Reading biographies of inspiring people is one of the best ways to open up your mind to what you can do and become. Learn about the human condition, history, philosophy, psychology, spirituality, economics, and more. As you do, you’ll change as a person. Your views will change. Your identity will change. Your goals will change.
Beyond reading books, you need to have experiences that stretch you, allowing you to see a different future, and giving you permission to actively pursue that future. Sometimes you need to go through very difficult experiences that show you that you can do hard things. Serving a mission did that for me, as did completing a PhD and becoming a father of five children in one calendar year. I’ve had many failures that have humbled me as well. Through all of these experiences, I’ve emerged a new person. Don’t avoid experiences that will shape and transform you. Your future self must be stronger, wiser, and more capable than your current self. That can only happen through rigorous, challenging, and new experiences.
2. Desire. You won’t pursue or engage in something if you don’t want it. Statistics show that most people hate their jobs. Even still, they have their reasons for going to work—whether social, financial, or otherwise. Thus, they endure unenjoyable means to achieve their desired ends.
You spend your time engaging in activities because in the end, you believe those activities will get you what you want. But what if you want the wrong thing? Or, put another way, what if you wanted something else?
What if “paying the bills” was no longer the goal? Would you still keep that job you hated?
Just because you want something doesn’t mean you should want it. Our desires do not come from our innate personality. Instead, our desires are trained, usually through experiences we’ve had, society, media, and those around us. Desires aren’t innate. They are trained and fueled. They are clung to and identified with. Your desires shouldn’t be mistaken as the “real” you. They are simply things you’ve attached meaning to, which you can also detach from or change the meaning of.
As an example, let’s say you’re a sports fan and have been since you were young. You may think being a sports fan is a part of your innate personality.
Not so.
Yes, sports are a part of your personality and identity. But you are the one actively fueling that side of your personality. You could stop fueling it. You could actively let go of that part of your identity and, over time, stop being interested in sports altogether. This may not be your goal or interest, but it is indeed possible. You’d need a reason to stop identifying with sports and continuing to carry that part of you into the future.
Just because you want something now doesn’t mean you’ll want it in five years or even next year. If you look back on what you wanted five years ago, chances are that much of what you wanted you no longer do. You’ve changed, your circumstances have changed, and thus your goals have changed.
Often, your current desires—such as sleeping in, binge-watching Netflix, or staying up late with friends—are at odds with better outcomes. Knowing that desires can be trained, and that your current desires were trained, allows you to question your current desires. It also allows you to proactively choose desires worth having and then training those desires to become genuine and deep.
You can get yourself to want anything. You might as well be intentional about what you train yourself to want.
If your future self is the evolved version of you, then your future self has a higher level of confidence, capability, and freedom than you presently have. They have different goals, concerns, and desires than you currently have.
Right now, you don’t truly want what your future self wants.
Your future self is an acquired taste.
You have to learn to want and value what you don’t currently want. If your future self is successful, you must learn to want what it takes to become successful. If your future self is healthier, you need to learn to want to be healthier. Training your desires is essential to choosing goals that are worth pursuing.
What you want right now may not truly be worth your time. I can speak for myself here: My current desires and directions may not be worth pursuing. I need to pause and question what I currently want. I know that my future self—the person I want to be—has knowledge, skills, characteristics, relationships, and more that I don’t currently have.
Personality is all about preferences and interests. The “introvert” prefers sitting in the corner. But that same introvert can, if they wanted to, train themselves to prefer being in the crowd. But “being in the crowd” would have to be relevant to their ultimate goals. The “extrovert” may have trouble sitting alone in a room by themselves. But they can learn to do so, and quiet their minds, if they have a purpose.
When you evolve as a person, you develop a sense of purpose that expands beyond your personal preferences and interests. This purpose pushes you outside of your preferences, and ultimately shifts who you are.
You train desire by actively and intentionally pursuing it. As was discussed in the previous chapter, passion follows engagement and skills. You can learn to become passionate about anything. You might as well be intentional about what you choose to become passionate about. As Napoleon Hill stated, “Desire is the starting point of all achievement, not a hope, not a wish, but a keen pulsating desire which transcends everything.”
Desire is the second source of goals. Your desires can and must be trained. Your life will become far more successful when you choose desires that produce outcomes your future self wants.
3. Confidence. You won’t conjure or entertain goals you don’t believe you can achieve. The list you wrote of your past twenty-four hours reflects your current level of confidence. Looking at your list, how many of those items required courage? How many came easily? How much of your time was spent advancing toward goals beyond your current capabilities?
Your job and income level are based on your confidence.
Your friends are based on your confidence.
How you dress is based on your confidence.
Confidence is the basis of imagination—which is required for seeing and choosing a future beyond your current capability and circumstances. Confidence reflects your personal belief in what you can do, learn, and accomplish.
The greater your confidence, the bigger your future self.
The challenge of confidence is that it can easily be shattered. Confidence is fragile, not constant. Traumatic and painful experiences can wreck your confidence and imagination. Every one of us goes through painful experiences that become an ever-present thorn in our side, paralyzing our ability, hope, and desire to move on.
The entire next chapter of this book focuses on trauma and its impact on personality. But for now, what you need to know is that trauma destroys your confidence. People often have very limited goals due to unresolved trauma. Sadly, when such is the case, then avoiding the painful emotions becomes the goal.
Confidence is built through acts of courage.
It takes courage to face the past, expose yourself to it until it no longer hurts, and change it. It takes courage to admit what you truly want with your life. It takes courage to attempt challenging goals, and to fail along the way.
While driving home from my office one day, I saw an extremely overweight man running in gym shorts and no shirt. His flabby body was glistening with sweat in the Florida sun.
This man inspired me. He was being audaciously public about his future self. He didn’t care what I or anyone thought about his jiggling flab or stretch marks. His eyes were fixed on the steps ahead of him. His focus was laser. His sweat was dripping. His identity was shifting.
At some point or another, this runner became aware of and exposed to better ways of living. He saw value in improving his behavior and choices. He glimpsed himself as a healthier version of himself. He began to question his current desires. The quality and consistency of his behavior is based on the quality and specificity of his goal. If his goal is clear and compelling, he will be running a lot more and that fat will soon be gone. If his goal is not clear and compelling, then his running will be sporadic, inconsistent, and lead to mediocre results.
In any case, for at least that one moment, this man was acting from the perspective of a future self he hoped to become. He saw a different future for himself and had a reason to go out and run. If that purpose is fueled and his identity is trained, he could, and will, become that person.
Confidence is built through acts of courage and commitment. As he brazenly ran with an exposed and protruding belly, his confidence was skyrocketing.
This bold action was subconscious-enhancing. By courageously acting from the vantage point of your future self, you have peak experiences that enhance your subconscious, setting a new baseline for how you see yourself and the world, and a new baseline for what you expect. Peak experiences do not occur randomly but must be intentional. As the prolific writer and philosopher Colin Wilson explained:
If you want a positive reaction (or a peak experience), your best chance of obtaining it is by putting yourself into an active, purposive frame of mind. . . . Depression . . . is the natural outcome of negative passivity. The peak experience is the outcome of an intentional attitude.
As you intentionally and courageously pursue meaningful goals, you’ll have peak experiences. Those peak experiences will open you up, making you more flexible as a person. You will stop rigidly seeing yourself as the person you once were. You will become more confident and capable to create and achieve bigger goals.
Peak experiences are rare for most people, but can happen regularly. You could have a peak experience today if you choose to. You must be intentional. You must be courageous. You must move your life in the direction you genuinely want to go.
With each step this runner takes toward his future self, he believes more in its reality. His behavior reflects that reality, even if in the beginning that behavior is intermittent and inconsistent. Over time, if he continues acting consistent with his future, he’ll want it more. His identity will become solidified. Eventually he’ll get to the point where his future self is his current self, in all ways.
He’ll no longer identify with his former self. He may no longer even remember what it was like to be his former self. The past will be informational, not emotional.
Confidence is key to the goals you set as a person. The greater your confidence, the more powerful your goals. Your confidence is something you must protect. You earn your confidence through intentional action toward meaningful goals. You can only borrow so much confidence from the distant past. More so, your confidence is based on who you’ve recently been.
You can build confidence through small but consistent actions reflecting your future self. You can also build confidence through daring and bold power moves toward your future self. A “power move” is an aggressive action toward your future self. It could be quitting a job you hate, investing in a mentor, going for a run in public, having an honest conversation, publishing a blog post even if you’re scared, asking for a raise.
The more power moves you make, the more peak experiences you have. The more peak experiences you have, the more flexible and confident you’ll become as a person. The more flexible and confident you are, the more imaginative and exciting will be the future you create and pursue.
Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.
—Albert Einstein
Often, identity and personality are reactions to life events, circumstances, and habits. Few people intentionally define and shape their identity, based on who they plan to be, and then become that person. I say “that” person because your current and future selves are two different people.
Your future self isn’t you. Your future self would do things differently, hopefully better, than how you do things now. Your future self should be evolved and different from your current self. To stay the same, although it is expected and even culturally celebrated, means you’re not learning, advancing, and changing. Instead, you’re stuck in a story, avoiding new experiences, and limiting your potential.
There’s another reason why viewing your future self as a different person from your current self is essential for making big changes in your life. Without viewing yourself in an imagined and different way, it’s actually not possible to engage in deliberate practice. This is called “deliberate” for a reason. You have a goal and the practice is targeted directly at that goal. The practice is purposeful and measured, not random and based merely on a “love of the process.”
You need something—or better yet, someone—to be working toward. You need a vision that gives meaning and purpose to your practice. Yes, engaging in what you love for the sake of it is all well and good. But you won’t actually push your perceived limits without visualizing your future self free of those limits.
Successful people start with a vision of their future self and use it as the filter for everything they do. Take, for example, Matthew McConaughey. During his speech after he won an Academy Award for Best Actor, McConaughey explained who his “hero” was:
When I was fifteen years old, I had a very important person in my life come to me and say, “Who’s your hero?” And I said . . . “You know who it is? It’s me in ten years.” So I turned twenty-five. Ten years later, that same person comes to me and says, “So, are you a hero?” And I was like, “Not even close! No, no, no.” She said, “Why?” I said, “Because my hero’s me at thirty-five.” So you see, every day, every week, every month, and every year of my life, my hero’s always ten years away. I’m never gonna be my hero. I’m not gonna attain that. I know I’m not, and that’s just fine with me, because that keeps me with somebody to keep on chasing.
One day, you will become your future self. The question is: Who is your future self?
In answering this question, you should think in terms of what you’d ideally want. Not in terms of your current circumstances or identity. Who cares who you’ve been. Who do you want to be? That’s your true and authentic self (for now).
Designing your future self requires imagining what their reality and daily experiences are like—the more vivid and detailed the better. What types of freedoms, choices, circumstances, experiences, and daily behaviors does your future self engage in?
When you become the architect of your own identity, you put less stock into how you view your current self. Your current self is important, but also limited. Your future self will be different. They’ll see things differently. They’ll have different freedoms. They’ll have different relationships, daily activities, and experiences. What seems totally mind-blowing or exciting to you now is “normal life” for your future self.
Who do you want to be, if you were totally honest with yourself?
This is where you’ll want to pull your journal out. Write down, in as much detail as you possibly can, who your future self is.
To decide on your mission, simply look over all of your goals and then ask yourself: Which one of these goals would enable me to become the person I need to be to achieve everything else I want in my life. The answer to that question is your mission.
—Hal Elrod
After you’ve taken the time to really think about your future self, and about what their circumstances and possibilities are like, your next move is to think about the one major goal or outcome that would make your future self possible.
One goal.
Having multiple goals doesn’t require that you focus. Having multiple goals is a reflection of fear and a lack of decision-making. You need one major goal. This one major goal needs to be measurable, definable, and visualizable. This one goal needs to clearly help and support all of the key areas of your life. This is why income goals are so powerful. If you’re a writer, that goal may be a certain number of page views or subscribers. If you’re a consultant, that goal may be the number of high-paying clients. If you’re a runner, that goal may be the time of your marathon.
One goal creates focus.
Focus creates momentum.
Momentum and confidence spill over into all other areas of your life. That’s why, in the book The Power of Habit, author Charles Duhigg explains that when you improve one area of your life, all other areas improve as well. He calls this “keystone habits.” Think of your one major goal as your “keystone goal.” This one goal—by aggressively pursuing it and actively achieving it—helps you do everything else you’re trying to do.
In the case of Andre, his one specific outcome was getting into Harvard. For him, that one outcome would allow him to become successful and not return to prison. Had Andre had five or more outcomes he was trying to pursue, he likely would never have gotten out of prison. His single goal gave direction and purpose to all of the sub-goals or other things he wanted to achieve.
Andre’s single goal shaped his process for creating his future self. This is extremely important because, as of late, there is a lot of really bad advice when it comes to achieving success. Many people recommend focusing entirely on the “process,” and essentially ignoring the result. Yet it’s impossible to determine a “process,” let alone an effective one, without a goal in mind. Moreover, without regularly measuring your progress and results along the way, it’s impossible to determine if your process is working.
Your process must be based on the desired result you seek. You must begin with the end in mind. “Process” alone means nothing without the context of a goal. Process-first thinking is tactical and moves your life forward without a plan, trying to find whatever has worked for others.
Conversely, end-in-mind thinking is strategic and lived backward, where you reverse-engineer your process based on the results you want. Thus, “process” without measurement isn’t a process at all. The desired outcome determines the process for getting it. The results you get along the way determine the adjustments to that process.
In his book Zero to One, billionaire Peter Thiel explains why “process” thinking leads to mediocrity. Instead, Thiel suggests having a “definite” attitude and purpose. As he states:
Indefinite attitudes to the future explain what’s most dysfunctional in our world today. Process trumps substance: when people lack concrete plans to carry out, they use formal rules to assemble a portfolio of various options. This describes Americans today. In middle school, we’re encouraged to start hoarding “extracurricular activities.” In high school, ambitious students compete even harder to appear omnicompetent. By the time a student gets to college, he’s spent a decade curating a bewilderingly diverse résumé to prepare for a completely unknowable future. Come what may, he’s ready—for nothing in particular.
According to expectancy theory, one of the most researched and core theories of motivation, in order to have high levels of motivation, you need three things:
A clear and compelling goal or outcome
A path or process you believe will lead to the attainment of that goal
A belief that you execute and succeed
You cannot have motivation without a goal. Research also shows you cannot have “hope” without a goal either. The more clear and definable the goal, the more direct the path and process. As you develop skills and knowledge, and move toward your goal, you’ll develop the confidence that you can then execute and succeed. You’ll want that goal more and more. Eventually, you’ll get there and your whole life will be changed. You’ll then have a new platform from which to set new and more stretching goals.
Commitment is a statement of what ‘is’. You can know what you’re committed to by your results, not by what you say your commitments are. We are all committed. We are all producing results. The result is proof of a commitment.
—Jim Dethmer, Diana Chapman, and Kaley Klemp
Look at your life right now. Whatever you see, that’s what you’re committed to. Whatever you currently weigh, that’s the weight you’re committed to. However much money you make, that’s how much money you’re committed to making. Your commitment in life is reflected, 100 percent, by the results you’re currently getting. If you were committed to something else, you’d have different results.
When you truly commit to the results you want, then your life starts improving. Your future self and the one major goal is what you should be committed to. Everything you do needs to be filtered through that one major goal.
The British rowing team—which hadn’t won a gold medal since 1912—got committed in preparation for the 2000 Sydney Olympics. That commitment was embodied in a single question they asked themselves before making any decision: Will it make the boat go faster? This one question allowed them to measure every situation, decision, and obstacle—and to not get derailed from their objective. With every decision or opportunity, every member of the team asked themselves: Will it make the boat go faster? If the answer was no, they didn’t do it. They were committed.
Eat the donut? . . . (Will it make the boat go faster?)
Stay up late and go to the party? . . . (Will it make the boat go faster?)
Because they were committed, they got the result they wanted. They won gold that year.
In a podcast, Lewis Howes interviewed John Assaraf, who shared what his first mentor taught him about goal-setting. After setting his goals in several areas of his life (e.g., health, spirituality, finances, relationships, service, etc.), and for one, three, five, and twenty-five years out, Assaraf’s mentor asked him, “Are you interested in achieving these goals, or are you committed?” to which Assaraf responded, “What’s the difference?” His mentor responded: “If you’re interested, you come up with stories, excuses, reasons, and circumstances about why you can’t or why you won’t. If you’re committed, those go out the window. You just do whatever it takes.”
You get whatever results you’re committed to. But, as a culture, we’ve been brainwashed to shy away from committing to specific outcomes. We’ve been taught that if we overcommit to something, then we’ll set ourselves up for failure and letdown. We’ve been taught that we should ignore the outcome and focus exclusively on the “process” instead. Committing to a specific result feels too scary, or too obsessed with externalities.
However, there are several benefits to committing to specific results. For example, when you commit to something specific, you’re forced to be honest with yourself and with everyone else about what you truly want. Being honest is rare. Most people hold their true desires tight to their chest. They are afraid to fully admit what they want most in life. But when you commit to a specific outcome, you’ve got to make that outcome your new narrative. That’s what you’re going to do. You may not know exactly how it will all play out, but you’re going to get there. That level of honesty and transparency is both rare and contagious—evoking confidence as you begin making progress, and conjuring desire to support as well as help from others.
Another reason to commit to specific results is that it clarifies your identity. Your identity comes from your goals. Being totally bought-in and clear about the end you have in mind instills a deep sense of purpose. You can imagine your future self in the position you want to be. Without a clear outcome, your identity becomes muddled. Who are you really? What are you really all about? What are you going to do? Who are you going to be?
Committing to a specific outcome—your one major goal—also forces you to improve. For example, when I started blogging online, I noticed that other writers, those committed to their process, would publish tons and tons of articles. But they weren’t getting any better. As the years passed by, I went on to become a professional writer. Many of those bloggers are still banging away, blog post after blog post. But their results haven’t changed because they haven’t committed to a clear outcome.
When you commit to a specific outcome, you’re forced to get better. Your results speak for themselves. If your results aren’t getting better, then you should question how interested or committed you are to this thing. You’ll know you’re serious about improving your results when you really begin tracking everything you do, down to the minutest detail. As Pearson’s Law states, “When performance is measured, performance improves. When performance is measured and reported, the rate of improvement accelerates.”
Committing to specific results also enhances motivation. According to expectancy theory, you cannot be motivated without a goal. The more singular and focused your goal, the more direct the path. The more direct and clear the path, the more motivated you will be. Complexity kills motivation, which is why lasering in on one keystone goal changes the game. A single goal allows for a more streamlined path, which allows you to not only see the outcome but also the path to making that outcome real. This skyrockets motivation and confidence.
Finally, committing to a specific result increases your faith. Napoleon Hill stated that “A definite purpose, backed by absolute faith, is a form of wisdom and wisdom in action produces positive results.” It doesn’t take much faith to say, “I’ll try,” or “We’ll see what happens.” But it does take intense faith to say, “This will happen. I don’t exactly know how, but it will happen.” This level of commitment forces you to your knees with greater sincerity. It leads you to doing things you’d never otherwise do. It forces miracles to occur.
A mistake repeated more than once is a decision.
—Paulo Coelho
When you commit to a bigger future, you’re forced to improve how you spend your evenings and mornings. The end of the day is a time for relaxation and reflection, not unhealthy consumption. By the end of the day, you’ve made a lot of decisions and are exhausted. As a result, your willpower is all dried up. Low willpower leads to high and unhealthy consumption behaviors—mostly the seeking of quick-release dopamine.
Social media, sugar, carbs, and other distractions are common evening activities for many people. With low willpower, it’s easy to fall into bad choices. These choices provide a short dose of dopamine or distraction, but come with a heavy cost. Engaging in wasteful and unhealthy behaviors at night negatively impacts your sleep, sets up your next morning for failure, and robs you of your confidence.
Watching a movie and spending quality time with loved one’s is different from spacing out on your smartphone with your family wanting your attention.
If you’re committed to becoming your desired future self, you need to avoid the pitfalls that come from low willpower at night. Otherwise, you’re taking one step forward during the day and stepping backward at night. This slows your progress.
Success at night and in the morning is crucial to becoming your future self.
A powerful antidote to wasteful distractions and poor behaviors at night is to go to bed sooner. Rarely are the evening hours spent powerfully. Usually, there is a point of diminishing returns—usually after eight or nine p.m., give or take an hour. Unless you’re doing something that connects you to your loved ones, you’re better off getting yourself to sleep earlier. Going to bed one hour earlier than your norm is one of the fastest ways to becoming your future self. You avoid wasteful consumption. You get more rest. You enable yourself to wake up earlier and get to work on your goals before the busyness of the day takes hold.
Most people go to bed far later than they should due to cultural norms. Going to bed after ten is unlikely to help you become your future self. You may be seen as a weirdo for going to bed progressively earlier. But not for long. Over time, your results will speak for itself. You’ll be getting more and better rest. You’ll be waking up earlier and with more confidence because you are avoiding goal-conflicting consumption.
Mark Wahlberg, as an example, goes to bed at seven p.m. so he can wake up at three a.m. to train his body at the elite level that allows him to do the work he does. He’s clear on his goals. His future self is much bigger than most people’s. Therefore, he’s willing to engage in a process, routine, and schedule that most people view as extreme or strange.
Go to bed one hour earlier. Avoid the nighttime hours when your willpower and decision-making ability are lowest. Set yourself up for success the next morning.
Lose an hour in the morning, and you will spend all day looking for it.
—Richard Whately
Get up early and start getting after your future self.
If you wake up early and immediately begin making power moves toward your dreams, you’ll build confidence and momentum that will ripple through the rest of your day. You’ll make better decisions and come off as far more congruent to those around you. As a result, you’ll start having better twenty-four-hour periods.
If you improve your days, you’ll improve your life. If you wait to wake up until you have to, and thus only engage in “urgent” activities, then you won’t make meaningful progress in your life. You’ll maintain the status quo, and, as a result, your time will fly by. The days, weeks, and years will pass you by and you won’t make meaningful progress.
If you’re going to achieve your one major goal and become your desired future self, then you need to be courageous. You need to take bold steps in the direction of your goal, daily.
Any bold move toward your goal is a power move. Power moves are subconscious-enhancing, resetting what is “normal” behavior for you. By engaging in intentional, goal-directed behavior in the morning, you’ll begin having peak experiences on a daily basis. Your brain and identity will change. Your confidence will increase. Your identity will become more flexible, allowing you to detach from who you’ve been and become your desired future self.
Peak experiences increase flexibility and confidence. Peak experiences require intentionality and proactive action. By going to bed with a purpose, waking up, and immediately making progress toward your future self, peak experiences will become commonplace for you. You’ll begin learning a ton each day, and with learning comes change. As the British philosopher Alain de Botton said, “Anyone who isn’t embarrassed by who they were twelve months ago isn’t learning enough.”
According to Abraham Maslow, the psychologist who coined the term and framework for self-actualization, having these types of stretching experiences—what Maslow called “peak experiences”—is how you become self-actualized. In fact, such experiences are required to get to that level.
Self-actualization is the idea that you are no longer inhibited by internal or external limitations but are free to pursue your highest potential and aims. Maslow defined peak experiences this way: “Rare, exciting, oceanic, deeply moving, exhilarating, elevating experiences that generate an advanced form of perceiving reality, and are even mystic and magical in their effect upon the experimenter.”
Peak experiences are rare because few people are proactively and intentionally creating a future self. Few people are committed to a specific future. Few people are courageously making power moves on a daily basis.
My questions for you are:
In order to become more flexible and facilitate regular peak experiences in your life, you’ll need to embrace uncertainty. As Harvard psychologist Dr. Ellen Langer explains, “If there are meaningful choices, there is uncertainty. If there is no choice, there is no uncertainty.” If you’re unwilling to face and interact with uncertainty, then you’ve greatly limited who you are and what you’ve become. You’ve limited your ability to make choices, because all choices involve uncertainty and risk.
Uncertainty can be difficult to handle. According to Dr. Daphna Shohamy, a neuroscientist at Columbia University’s Zuckerman Institute, a primary purpose of our brain is to predict the outcomes of our behavior.
That’s the most important utility of the brain. It’s why we form memories—to be able to accurately predict the future. The ability to predict the future and plan is what has allowed humans to thrive as a species for thousands of years.
What does this mean on a personal level?
Your brain is designed to keep you outside of situations of uncertainty. Uncertainty is something to be avoided. For this reason, when you’re in a new situation or trying something you’ve never done before, you often get a rush of emotions, like anxiety or fear. Several researchers argue that the unknown is in actuality the foundation of all fears. The fight-or-flight response is a chemical signal from your brain that you have no clue what might happen, so you had better get back to safety.
Your brain wants your life to be safe and predictable. Your brain will try to stop you from putting yourself in risky situations. However, paradoxically, your brain formulates its most powerful memories and learning as you experience new things—especially when your predictions about the future are wrong!
Dr. Shohamy explains that our brain changes and learns through “prediction errors,” which occur as we incorrectly predict what will happen. A prediction error is another term for failing. Failing is another term for learning. And learning is another term for changing.
Your future self will see the world differently than your current self to the degree that you learn and change. If you want to accelerate your learning, you’ll need to embrace uncertainty. You’ll need to take risks and make mistakes. As you do, you’ll experience far more emotions—highs and lows—and through those experiences you’ll change as a person. Those are the very peak experiences you can have daily when you become fully committed to your future self, instead of your current or former self.
Life becomes a lot more exciting and less repetitive when your future self becomes your daily mission, rather than avoiding uncertainty and change. Avoid consumption at night. Create peak experiences in the morning.
Only through imaging a future self with improved skills may we be able to motivate, plan, and execute the honing of skills through deliberate practice.
—Dr. Thomas Suddendorf, Dr. Melissa Brinums, and Dr. Kana Imuta
Your journal is a brilliant place to actively convince yourself, emotionally, that what you want is already yours—you influence yourself through strategic communication.
Many people think “journaling” is about documenting the past. It can be. But envisioning and strategizing the future will internalize and clarify your goal.
It is important to note, though, that in order to effectively influence or persuade yourself during your daily journaling sessions, you want to set the stage internally and externally before you start writing. With the right preframe ritual, your journaling sessions will become daily peak experiences, putting you into a peak state from which to live out the rest of your day. You can preframe yourself for peak experiences in the following ways:
Getting yourself into a distraction-free environment where you can think freely and without notifications going off (leave your smartphone either away from your body or on airplane mode)
Meditating or praying before writing
Reviewing your vision or goals before writing
Writing about things you’re grateful for—past, present, and future
Although it doesn’t matter what time of day you journal, just before or just after sleep are optimal, as your subconscious is most susceptible to influence due to the slowed state of your brain waves during these times. When writing, be mindful of your environment and how it is influencing your thoughts and emotions. Ideally, you would have a designated space for journaling, visualization, and future-pacing.
Once in your creation-space environment, take some deep breaths, and meditate or pray for a few moments before opening your journal. Affirm that you’re going to be successful today. That you’re going to succeed in what you’re trying to accomplish. That life is amazing.
Open your journal slowly.
Before you begin writing, review your goals. This includes your one major goal and a subset of smaller, more short-term goals. They should be written somewhere easily accessible. Reviewing your goals before writing in your journal activates the mindset and circumstances of your future self, so that when you begin writing in your journal, you’re writing as your future self, from their vantage point and perspective.
My own goals are written on the inside cover of my journal, so that every time I open it, all I need to do is look at that inside cover. Every month or so, I go through an entire journal and thus reassess and rewrite these goals. My goals are framed by answering the following questions:
Where am I now?
What were the wins from the past ninety days?
What are the wins I want from the next ninety days?
Where do I want to be in three years?
Where do I want to be in one year?
Every time I open my journal, I start by looking at the front cover and reading my answers to these questions. Of course, my answers—even my goals—change even on a monthly basis. It’s totally fine and expected that your plans adjust over time.
By looking at the recent wins from my last ninety days, I immediately feel a sense of movement and momentum. This gives me confidence. By seeing what I’m trying to accomplish in the short and long term, I’m reminded of my future self.
Each of these activities—from getting into the right environment, meditation, breathing, and viewing your recent wins and goals—puts you into the right mindset, so that when you write, you write from a higher and more powerful place.
There’s one more crucial thing you’ll want to do to properly get yourself in the right mindset, and that’s starting your writing from a place of gratitude and abundance.
The effects of gratitude journaling are well documented. Research has shown that gratitude consistently improves people’s emotional well-being. The regular practice of writing and reframing through gratitude can transform depression, addiction, and suicidal thoughts. Gratitude has been found to heal and transform relationships. In almost every way imaginable, gratitude has been found to help.
Up until recently, most of the research on gratitude has been self-reported. New studies, however, are showing that gratitude journaling not only affects emotional well-being, but can also improve the biomarkers of legitimate health risks such as heart failure.
Cardiac patients who are in Stage B, otherwise known as pre–heart failure, have a small window of time for reversing the downhill spiral toward fatal heart failure. In one study, doctors decided to have their patients try gratitude journaling during this small window. Patients were randomly assigned to either the experimental group or the control group. Those in the experimental group did an eight-week gratitude journaling intervention. Those in the control group underwent “treatment as usual” without gratitude.
After the eight weeks, all of the patients from both groups underwent assessments that included a six-item gratitude questionnaire, resting heart rate variability, and an inflammatory biomarker index. Those who practiced gratitude journaling showed a drop in heart failure symptoms and had reduced inflammation.
Praying about, meditating on, and then writing what you’re grateful for at the beginning of your journaling session immediately shifts your emotional and physical state, as well as your perspective. Gratitude and excitement, as well as confidence, can become the lens through which you write about both your past experiences and your future ones. When writing through the energy of gratitude, you’ll have positive expectations without unhealthy attachment toward what you’re trying to accomplish.
You’ll write from a place of joy, peace, and bliss. This emotional state will bring about lots of ideas you can execute, which will likely also take courage to accomplish. These are the exact emotions that will upgrade your subconscious and ultimately create your future self and circumstances.
Then, just write.
Don’t get overly attached to what you write about. You are only writing for your own psychological benefit. No one else will read this. Just write about your goals. They could be in bullet points. They could be in pictures. There’s no right or wrong way to do it.
Write with the expectation and excitement that your future self is real, and that you will be successful. Think in terms of what needs to be done to move yourself forward. Write down all of the things you’ll need to do now and people you’ll need to reach out to.
In December of 2019, Joe Burrow, the college quarterback for Louisiana State University (LSU), won the Heisman Trophy, the highest individual award for an outstanding player in NCAA football. Interestingly, two years earlier, Burrow had to make a difficult decision. He was the backup quarterback for Ohio State, and unless he made a switch, he wouldn’t be able to fully attempt his dreams.
So he transferred to LSU. During the 2018 season, Burrow and the LSU Tigers went 10–3. That season he threw 2,894 yards with 16 touchdown passes and had 5 interceptions. He showed signs of being a good quarterback, but nobody expected what would happen during the 2019 season. In 2019, LSU went undefeated, broke several single-season records for any college football team in history, and won the national championship. Burrow shattered several records himself, throwing 5,671 yards with 55 touchdowns and 6 interceptions.
In one season, Burrow went from being a pretty good quarterback to having arguably the greatest single season for a college quarterback in history. By the end of the 2019 season, he was the number one projected draft pick for the NFL’s 2020 season and the Heisman Trophy winner.
Nobody saw this coming, except Burrow.
In an interview with ESPN following the Heisman Trophy award, Burrow was asked: “Joe, if I had told you two seasons ago that you were going to win the starting job, you were going to beat Alabama, you were going to win a Heisman, you were going to be in the playoffs, you would have said what to me?”
Burrow’s response was inspiring and important. He replied:
I would have believed you. [emphasis mine] I know the work I’d put in up to that point. I just felt like I needed an opportunity. I knew the kind of players that were here, and Coach O sold me on a vision. I knew the work we had put in this off-season. So we totally expected to be in this position.
In 2017, Burrow had no evidence of the outcome. The fact is, what happened was so monumental that he should not have believed it was possible. But he did.
And that’s why it did happen.
Thinking about yourself, what would happen if your future self came to you and told you that everything you want to see happen was going to happen? Would you believe them? The answer better be yes. Because unless you believe it, it’s not going to happen. You need to be fully committed to becoming your future self and all that involves. That commitment will lead you down a crazy path. You’ll need to make hard decisions and follow your gut, sometimes against the advice of well-meaning people.
If your future self came to you and told you of the monumental things that happened, would you believe them?
The truth about personality is that it can, should, and does change. Your goals shape your identity. Your identity shapes your actions. And your actions shape who you are and who you’re becoming. This is how personality is developed.
The next several chapters focus specifically on the core levers of personality, those things you can directly control and that indirectly shape who you become. Every time you reimagine a future self and seek to achieve stretching goals, you’ll need to change each of these “personality levers.”
These four levers are:
Trauma, which either traps you in the past or propels extreme transformation and growth
Identity narrative, which is the story you tell about yourself and can be based either on your past or your desired future
Your subconscious, which pulls you back to homeostasis but can be continually upgraded through emotional experiences and future-self behaviors
Your environment, which either sustains who you are or forces you to evolve into someone new
Unless you’re strategic, these four levers will keep you locked in repetitious and predictable cycles. You’ll feel stuck and change will feel hard, if not impossible. However, when you understand how to move and shift these levers, then changes to your personality become sudden, dramatic, and inevitable.
The next four chapters will take on each of these four levers, one by one, teaching you how to use them effectively. As you do, you’ll be enabled to experience self-directed and radical transformation in your life and as a person.
Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.
—Archimedes