I know who I want to be. Do you?
An important part of discovering / creating your own future is to find out, or plan, who you are going to become.
This sounds kind of obvious– doesn’t everyone think about this?– but in reality, it isn’t often done.
That’s because exerting your will on the universe is hard.
It is a constant push— back and forth– between you creating the world you want through your actions, and the world pushing back on you saying “nope,” or deflecting you, like a soccer ball hitting a goalie.
You can get distracted or upset by this. Over time, life takes over, so you spend more energy on management and juggling what exists vs creating what doesn’t exist at all.
Eventually, you lose track of exactly who you want to be. You forget about it. Momentum eventually goes to zero.
I met with Dale Stephens yesterday, who I was mentoring while he was at the Thiel Fellowship. He knows exactly who he is planning to become in the “new” education movement. In comparison to Sugata Mitra, Sal Khan, etc., he has to know or he will be forgotten and/or trampled.
I also saw Ryan Holiday say “don’t plan too much” on Chase Jarvis’ show (which I’m going to be on next week btw), but I don’t agree. A deliberate positioning in regards to the future is, I think, ultimately necessary.
As you get older (if you’re ambitious), you realize this. Yes, I just played the age card. 🙂
So ask yourself: who is it that I want to become?
Do you know? If you do, great! It will help you find out who to meet, what you need to know, what skills to obtain, and everything else.
It’s if you do not know that you have a problem. I wouldn’t know how much money to raise for our company if I didn’t know how our company worked. I wouldn’t know who to hire if I didn’t know where we were going. It’s craziness that I ever would.
Yet people let the ocean of the universe move them in whatever direction fate “intends” (as if fate really intended anything).
Well, I have news for you. No matter who you are, I know what your future is.
Your future is to grow older, slowly become irrelevant and have outdated views, eventually die and become food for the living.
That is what the universe “wants.”
I heard a great quote the other day from Horace Mann:
Until you have done something for humanity, you should be ashamed to die.
So get to it. Thank you.
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