explains how to get better at visualizing your future self.
Now that 2020 finally seems to have left the station – hopefully without dragging any of your leftover plans under its wheels – I want to focus on the faraway future.
As life slowly returns to its factory settings, I’m noticing many people lulling themselves back into the very same old normal they were so keen to escape before COVID-19 parked in front of their driveway.
Thinking About the Future
Indeed, what’s been coming up a lot in client conversations recently is just how difficult people find it to come up with a compelling vision for their long-term future – especially when short-term concerns around security are taking priority.
The best way to look at the future is to invent it. – Alan Kay
My clients are obviously not alone in this. Part of the problem is that most people – me included – prefer to focus more on immediate and short-term gratification than on long-term prospering. Indeed, studies show that nearly fifty percent of you rarely or never think about what the next ten years might look like, and less than 20 percent think about it occasionally. Those figures increase the older you get.
I’ll briefly explain why thinking about the future is so hard on our poor little brains. I’ll also teach you how to become your own personal futurist.
Beware. I’m about to become that annoying dinner date who lectures you about needing to get your shit together and hammers on about his blockchain investments and pension funds. To make it worse, I won’t break eye contact with you, I’ll talk with my mouth full, and I’ll insist on taking your number afterward.
And if thinking further ahead than the next seven minutes causes you hives, then simply scroll to the bottom. I’ll share three easy visualization techniques that will help you to begin imagining your long-term future.
