How can you create a better future?
You pick up your past, analyze it, and create a better future.
Dan Sullivan came up with an amazing "Gap And Gain" concept. If you constantly compare yourself with your future identity, you are in the gap. But if you compare yourself with your past identity, you are in the gain.
Most people, somewhat makes progress in their life. At least to some scale. If you measure your past performance, with your present one. It will give you enough conviction that you have improved.
However, if you compare yourself with what you want to be in the future, you will fall short of your aspirations. There will be lack of confidence— if you can actually pull it off.
Whereas your past performance analysis gives you enough examples that you have done things on a small scale. So, you can repeat them on a large scale.
It's better to compare yourself with your past than with your future. Your future self could be anyone. It can be a millionaire, it can the President. Whereas, your past self was who you were, and your present self is who you are. Both are real. Your future self can be(and in most cases) imaginary. Someone you can never be. Something, you can never be.
Take a look at your life, what progress you have made in the last 5 years? What could you have done differently to achieve the same results but in less time?
What could you have done to achieve better results, in the same time?
Confidence and conviction comes from past performance. Your mindset, your ideologies and your beliefs are based on your life experience. You will often believe that the principles will hold true in the future too.
Your past can be either a record of regrets or a teacher.
To create better results in the future, always keep measuring your past. Evaluate, and tweak some changes in your behaviour, your beliefs to improve your decisions in the future.
Just ask yourself, "What are the things you feel good about doing in the last 30 days, and how can you do better in the next 30 days?"
In what way you have made progress? And in what way you can make more?
The more clear you are about your future, the more meaningful your present will become. People work day and night for 20 years, like a horse. To make their future important, meaningful. And happy.
Their present struggles become meaningful because of a promised better future.
What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.
If you can't promise yourself an inspiring future, you can never be happy in the present moment. You will never work with your true potential. Your work will turn into struggle. Your hope will turn into despair.
This is not about delaying gratification. It is about believing in a poweful future. Something we all want to believe in.
Celebrate even the smallest of victories
Measure progress every week, every month, and every year. At the end of each interval, take time to review any form of progress. You need only a few small wins every now and then. Even a few dollars, added every day over a decade will make you rich.
Accountability will add more fuel to your progress. If you measure and report your progress to someone else. When performance is measured, it improves. When it is reported, it accelerates.
Habits are not actually formed through repetition but through deep emotions. To build habits, actively celebrate even the smallest wins. This creates a positive association with your desired behaviour in your subconscious mind.
It's easier to approach a desired future than to avoid an undesired one
Our behaviour is motivated in one of the two ways. Either we are trying to approach something or we are trying to avoid something.
Although both are powerful, it far more sustainable to focus on what you want in the long term, rather than what you don't want.
Because, what you focus on expands. This is true in improving your habits.
Rather than spending all your energy on focusing on something you are trying to fix, just focus on what you want to improve.
You can change. You can break the cycle. None of the things that happened in your past will dictate how you will end up in the future. But for that to happen, you need to make some shifts.
The subtle shift in focus you can use to build a better future.
You can always reframe the past. You can not change what has happened. But you can always change how you see things and what they mean to you.
If you are the one who screwed your life, it is you who have to bounce back on the right track.
Pick up things that adds to your positive perspective.
Work hard at your job, and you can make a living. Work hard on yourself and you can make a fortune. — Jim Rohn