Listen To This Podcast

Summary

Want more training like this, get my 3 most important career tips here. 

Some of the coolest movies are ones that depict characters traveling in time to meet their past or future selves, or manipulating history by changing one detail.

If you could go back in time and talk to you past self, what career or life advice would you give yourself?!

Of course, there is no really good way to speak to our past selves. However, there is a good chance that – along the space/time continuum – your future self would LOVE to talk to you right now. Any idea what they might want to say to you?

Unless you happen to have a really awesome crystal ball handy, it’s difficult to say exactly what the future will hold for you over the next 10 years. However, nobody knows you better than you – and even though some of the details must be unknown, nobody has a better sense of what your 10-years from now self might have encountered or might want you to focus on now.

Here’s the question: your 10-year older self is talking to you right now, but are you listening?

We do favors for our future selves all the time. We brush our teeth, we pack a lunch, we pay our bills….what favor is your 10-year older self hoping you’ll do for them now?

Full Transcript

Some of my favorite movies are ones like “Back to the Future” where characters travel in time and have encounters with their future or past-selves. Or there are other movies that depict alternate realities or timelines, where just one tiny change changes EVERYTHING. I just finished watching “Man in the High Castle,” which is like that.

Sometimes people will write notes to themselves in the future (there are even services like https://www.futureme.org/ that let you do this). This is often the idea behind things like time vaults, too. Where people bury something in the ground as a message to people in the future.

But have you ever wondered what advice you would give to yourself if you could travel back in time? Would you interrupt the space-time continuum to create an alternate reality? To change history?

Last week, especially in the run up to the new year, I was thinking a lot about New Year’s resolutions….and that got me thinking this week about giving advice to our past or future selves.

Let me ask you: knowing what you know today, if you could give career advice to yourself ten years ago – what would you say? It might be, “you should totally invest in THIS” or “whatever you do, DON’T take THAT job.” But, you know what they say, hindsight is 20/20. In any event, sorry to say: there’s no great way to get in touch with yourself ten years ago. Even if there were, it might not be a good idea because you could disrupt the whole space-time continuum and then WHO KNOWS what might happen!

However, along the space-time continuum, you ten years from now would LOVE to get in touch with you. Is there any way you might be able to hear them? I know, it’s hard, but hear me out here. The ten-years-into the future you is still you – and nobody knows that person better than you do, so what do you think you might be saying to yourself ten years from now?

Sure, you don’t have a crystal ball nobody knows EXACTLY what the future holds. But are there some big things, some big goals that you know will still be important to you ten years from now? If so, do you have a plan for accomplishing those goals such that, ten years from now, you’ll be able to look back with satisfaction at having achieved those goals?

In many ways, you ten-years-from-now is depending on you to have a plan that you can work on over the next ten years so that, in ten years, you’ll have achieved what you both want.

It may be impossible to know exactly the hurdles you might face in the work you do over the next ten years, but I bet you can make some pretty good guesses. Based on those guesses, I bet you can come up with some pretty good plans too, to make your dreams happen and to the impact you want to make happen.

Most people might not think this way. Most people might just say, “well, there goes another year” without considering the opportunity they have to hear from their future self. But not you, because you’re going to think more proactively and strategically. You’re going to listen to yourself calling from the future. Because if you do, I think it will help both you and them definitely win at work.

Want more training like this, get my 3 most important career tips here.