How to Consciously Design Your Ideal Future

1. Hope in Your Future Gives Meaning to Your Present

Without hope in your future, your present loses meaning.

Purpose is essential. Viktor Frankl's experiences in concentration camps demonstrated that those who lost hope in the future quickly succumbed to despair and death. Hope, in this context, isn't just wishful thinking; it's a tangible and specific goal that provides meaning and direction. Without a clear purpose, the present becomes unbearable, and individuals lose their will to live.

Hope as the will and the way. Hope is comprised of both the will to achieve a goal and the belief that there is a way to achieve it. High-hope individuals are flexible and resourceful, finding multiple pathways to reach their goals, while low-hope individuals tend to stick to one approach and give up when faced with obstacles.

Cultivating hope. To cultivate hope, one must have a clear and specific goal, believe in their own agency to influence outcomes, and possess the ability to envision multiple pathways to success. This proactive approach transforms hope from a passive wish into a powerful driver of action and resilience.

2. Your Past Narrative Shapes Your Future

Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.

Past as a story. The way you frame your past experiences significantly impacts your present and future. A negative narrative can lead to reactive, avoidance-oriented goals, while a positive reframing can fuel growth and purpose. Your past is not a fixed entity but a story you can revise.

Reframing for growth. Emotional health involves both a positive past and an exciting future. Reframing past events in a positive light, even the most challenging ones, allows you to learn from them and integrate them into your personal growth. This process transforms pain into a catalyst for purpose.

Gain vs. Gap. Transforming experiences into personal growth involves adopting a "gain" mindset, focusing on what you've learned and how you've grown, rather than dwelling on the "gap" between your expectations and reality. This proactive approach empowers you to own your experiences and shape your future.

3. Your Environment Shapes Your Goals

You’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with.

Environmental influence. Your environment, including the people you surround yourself with, significantly influences your goals and behaviors. Unconsciously, you adopt the expectations and norms of your surroundings, highlighting the importance of being mindful of your context.

Mindfulness and choice. Mindfulness involves becoming aware of how your environment influences you and consciously choosing to align with your Future Self. This requires actively seeking out new perspectives, experiences, and people who embody the qualities you aspire to develop.

Transformational relationships. To align yourself with specific people, you’ll want to be transformational and not transactional in your mindset. In transformational relationships, there is no keeping score. There’s a genuine desire to help and support each other. The purpose and approach of the relationship is transformation, which focuses on giving, gratitude, and growth.

4. Connection to Your Future Self Improves Present Decisions

The idea of long-term planning is a relatively new concept from a human evolution standpoint.

Empathy for your Future Self. Building a connection to your Future Self requires seeing them as a different person with different perspectives and priorities. This empathy allows you to appreciate how your current actions impact their well-being and make wiser decisions in the present.

Investing vs. Costing. Every action you take is either an investment in or a cost to your Future Self. Short-term rewards that lead to negative long-term consequences are costs, while long-term reward behaviors are investments. The more you invest, the clearer and more vivid your Future Self becomes.

Making your Future Self vivid. Make your Future Self vivid and detailed by writing a letter from your Future Self to your current self. Choose whatever time frame you want. As you practice imagining your Future Self, you get better and clearer at being connected with them.

5. Big Goals Trump Urgent Battles

By our nature as rational, conscious creatures, we cannot help but think of the future.

Short-term vs. long-term focus. Most people are caught up in short-term goals and urgent battles, limiting their ability to think strategically about the future. To escape this cycle, it's essential to lift your gaze and prioritize important, long-term goals over immediate demands.

Prioritizing the important. Eisenhower said, “I have two kinds of problems: the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.” By putting first things first, you create space to think beyond your current context and invest in your Future Self.

Thinking bigger. Elevate what you think you can do. Rather than asking, “How can I make $100,000 this year?” ask, “How can I make $10,000,000 this year?” Different questions spark innovative thinking and new angles.

6. Action Beats Inaction

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.

Entering the arena. The biggest threat to your Future Self is staying on the sidelines, paralyzed by analysis and fear. It takes courage to enter the arena, face the realities of the situation, and learn from your failures.

Learning through doing. You cannot deliberately practice on the sidelines. When you’re not in the arena, you’re failing by default. The longer you hesitate to enter the playing field, the longer you delay the essential learning curve.

Embracing reality. Being in the arena means you’re finally facing and embracing reality. In the arena, you’re no longer afraid of reality because it has become your instructor. Eventually, as your Future Self you’ll be able to shape reality.

7. Success Can Breed Failure

Success Disease makes people begin to forego to different degrees the effort, focus, discipline, teaching, teamwork, learning, and attention to detail that brought ‘mastery’ and its progeny, success.

The clarity paradox. Success can lead to more options and opportunities, which can diffuse efforts and undermine the very clarity that led to success in the first place. This highlights the importance of continually updating your vision and filtering out nonessential distractions.

Maintaining focus. The more successful you become, the more lesser goals present themselves. The more opportunities and quick wins come your way, the greater the need to continually update your vision to filter out the 99 percent of nonessential traps to your energy and focus.

Moral code. To thrive in a societal group, individual members must obey a moral code that supports the group interests over individual interests. This can be difficult for people whose individualistic evolution runs deep. Without religion to provide meaning for living a moral code, people have less reason to do what’s best for the group.

8. Your Future Self Drives Your Present

It is absurd to suppose that purpose is not present because we do not observe the agent deliberating.

Teleology and purpose. All human behavior is goal-driven, the means to some end. The goal or end is the cause of the behavior. Health, for example, is the end of walking, losing weight, seeing the doctor, and eating well.

Intelligent design. Every human creation you see is the byproduct of intelligent design. Someone had an idea for creating something, and turned their idea into a physical form. This process is trial and error, but driven by a goal.

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

9. Your Future Self Will Be Radically Different

Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished.

The end-of-history illusion. People tend to underestimate how much their personalities will change in the next decade, assuming their Future Self will be largely the same as their current self. This "end-of-history illusion" limits their ability to envision and create a different future.

Growth vs. fixed mindset. People with a fixed mindset believe their basic qualities are fixed traits, while those with a growth mindset are more interested in learning and growing. Embracing a growth mindset allows you to love your current self while appreciating how temporary your current perspectives and attributes are.

Embrace change. Knowing you can and will change enables you to love your current self. You’re less rigid about how you see yourself. You don’t need all the answers right now. You don’t need to prove your current capability or worth.

10. Your Future Self is the Ultimate Consequence

Time will be your friend or your enemy; it will promote you or expose you.

Paying the piper. Everything you do has a consequence, for better or worse. Your Future Self is the exaggerated result of your current decisions. You can't escape your Future Self, and you can't escape paying the Piper. The only choice you have is, when will you pay the Piper, and how much?

Investing vs. costing. Everything you do can be categorized as either a cost to or an investment in your Future Self. Costs put your Future Self deeper in debt, while investments make your Future Self wealthier.

The compound effect. The compound effect refers to how small changes compound into dramatic results. It’s the ripple effect you get from the choices you make. In life, you not only reap what you sow, you reap more than you sow.

11. Vivid Future Self Accelerates Progress

What preoccupies us is the way we define success.

Clarity and measurement. The more vivid, detailed, and measurable your Future Self, the easier it is to become your Future Self. Effective progress comes with a combination of measurable metrics, a vivid vision of your Future Self, and clear mile markers. Without these elements, people wander.

Selective attention. Clarify what you’re looking for, and you’ll see it everywhere. What was once hidden in plain sight will become radically obvious. You see what you’re looking for.

Strategic focus. A massive threat to your Future Self is simply that you’re thinking way too small. Multiply your vision 10-times or 100-times larger. You’ll be forced to understand the principles, rules, and strategies of living at a higher level.

12. Your View of God Impacts Your Future Self

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.

God and self-perception. Whatever views, or lack of views, you have of God will directly impact your views of your own Future Self. Whatever view you hold of God largely impacts your views of yourself, your nature, your potential, and your trajectory.

Theosis and potential. Being a literal child of God means there is a reason for being here. Life isn’t random. We came from God and chose to come here for development, education, and experience. Moreover, being a literal child of God means that within us is the inherent capacity to become like God, in all ways.

Freedom and respect. God loves and respects us irrespective of what we choose. Each person should be fully respected in what they choose to believe about God, about life, and about themselves. We are all extremely ignorant and limited in our current perspectives, and our Future Selves will see things from a more elevated state.

Last updated: March 16, 2025