The future you create

It sounds strange, but you really do create your future.

You can’t control what happens to you, what hand life has dealt for you, but you can play it to the best of your ability.  You can play for keeps, you can play to win, and you can simply choose to play.

Once you make up your mind that you do have some control over your future, and accept responsibility for your past, it’s time to take massive, relentless action.

Now don’t get me wrong, life will throw challenges your way you hadn’t even thought of.  For me, concussions, vision issues, bad decisions.  All those things impact where I am today.  I choose to own them all.

When thinking about what massive action you’re going to take, there are a couple of best practices to bear in mind.

Let’s chat a minute about each of those things in turn.

What is your best case scenario?  If you choose a path, say as a student you decide to become a teacher, or a lawyer, or a doctor, what choices do those decisions imply as a best case?  A teacher has two months in the summer off, but a capped salary.  A lawyer can help under served people defend themselves, but it’s a demanding profession.  As a doctor you can literally save lives, but you won’t be able to save all of them.  That’s going to be hard.

Each of these things has pros and cons, and the most important question is can you wake up for the next 20,000 days doing that thing?

So that brings us to your time allocation.  It’s very difficult to become a stockbroker, and an MD.  Not that it can’t be done, but the question is, is that how you want to spend your time?  The only way to do this is to live an integrated life.  Where your personal, family, business, and community are all interwoven into the way you do things.  Into the decisions you make.  Into your life in general.  So ask yourself, by saying yes to this, what are you in effect saying no too?  Or can you make it all work?

Can you be successful, and good?  Yes.  Can you be successful, happy, a massive contributor who also has a loving family?  Yes.  Can you be a tyrant and successful?  Yes.  Can you be on your third family, and your oldest children don’t talk to you?  Absolutely.  So bear in mind what you do will impact you for years to come.

And the third thing, the outcome you want.  How will you measure it?  As a doctor, you will save lives, but not all of them.  Should you save most?  Some?  One?  Does that one you save make up for all the others you can’t?  It’s truly amazing all the things you can have, if you just measure them and judge how you are progressing towards them.

You don’t have to keep score the way I do.  You can simply know where you want to go, and get a general idea of where you’re headed.  So long as you know what path you should be on, you’ll head in the right direction.

And that, is the future you create.

So take some time and think about your future.  Then get to it.