If you’re a full-time employee, that means you spend around 8 hours a day — 160 hours per month — helping someone else fulfill their dream.
Who could you become if you put a fraction of that time toward your own ambitions?
I’ve been guilty of thinking that the time will come eventually when I have more time to build a business or launch an online course. In reality, any material change must happen a day at a time, starting now.
It’s a powerful idea: You have to start acting out your ideal before you reach it.
That means you have to adopt the habits you think the best version of yourself would adopt, dress the way you think you’d dress, and speak and act as if you’d already achieved your vision for yourself. Don’t wait to “arrive” somewhere or become a better version of yourself to start acting like it.
To transform yourself, in effect, you must force your future into the present.
Cement your vision
Before that happens, you have to ask yourself who would you be and what would your life look like if you could design everything exactly to your liking?
Maybe you’d like to start a company or own property, or achieve a certain body-fat percentage. Perhaps you envision having a family and being an exceptional role model for your kids.
You have to put your vision into writing for it to become real.
Remember, who we are comes down to what we do everyday, so start by mapping out your habits and routines, as specifically as possible. Start with one over-arching question, then go deeper:
- What does your ideal day look like?
- What time do you wake up and go to sleep?
- What’s your morning routine?
- What hours do you work or play?
- Who do you spend time with?
- What’s your exercise routine like? What do you eat?
- Who do you manage or report to?
Writing out answers to these questions gives you a roadmap to a higher iteration of yourself. To accelerate your path forward, all you have to do is start acting out those habits and answers as soon as possible.
The power of experimentation
Just because you write out answers to specific questions on who you aspire to be and what you aspire to do, moving ahead still requires trial and error. You won’t know what makes a good stepping stone until you test it out.
For example, while I was still studying sports science in university, I knew that I wanted to write for a living. I wasn’t sure how I would get there, but my aspirations provided my North Star.
I started out by writing in a private journal every morning for 20 minutes. That gave me a solid practice for several years, but I didn’t make progress because no one else was reading my work — I had no idea if it could hold any water in the real world.
After some months of that I felt stagnant, and one of my mentors advised me to start a blog online. The idea scared me. I was nervous, shy, and unsure of how to make a website, but I knew that taking action would spark ideas and growth.
That was 2018.
The experiment formed the earliest bones of this website you’re reading now, and it has led to countless opportunities over the years. Writing online catapulted my progress as a writer. I found my voice, developed an audience, and learned how to build a personal brand.
Experiments — if you stick with them — have an iterative quality to them. Since launching my website, several of my experiments have become serious side projects, and I turned two of them into bestselling books.
When you bring your future into your present — through cementing your vision and experimenting — you put yourself on an upward trajectory toward your ideal.
As you move along this path, your answers to those initial questions become more refined, which in turn makes your habits and actions more refined.
3 daily actions to build the future today
If you aren’t building your own future with what you do everyday, you’re either standing still or building someone else’s.
Sure, a certain amount of the energy you expend each day likely has to go toward your day job for the time being. But if you don’t allocate a specific amount of time and thought for your own ambitions, then you won’t be able to bring your future into the present.
Here’s a helpful way to break this down into daily actions:
- Curate what you consume: More books, online courses, and deep conversations. Less social media, video games, and porn.
- Free your mind: Take time to really think about something. Journal, meditate, and sit in silence each day. Cut scrolling on your phone.
- Create with purpose: Put your mind to work on something you care about. Solve a problem, create something beautiful or abstract. Especially in this era, the opposite of consumption is cathartic.
These actions don’t have to take much time. Give each activity as little as ten minutes, and you’ll feel like a different person on day one.
To hit all three, every single day for six months? That’s how you become unrecognizable.
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