The Realm of Wisdom | Self-Help Maven

Asking your future self to make decisions allows you to play the long game: The problem is that we don’t play the long game. We don’t plan for the future. We think the future is a day, a week, a month, a year. We think the future is ten years. The one-hundred-year-old version of yourself will tell you that a decade goes by in the blink of an eye. It’s nothing. Making decisions based solely on the next ten years is ludicrous when given the expanse of a lifetime. We have to play the long game. Our future selves understand the value of time better than any of us. We say we value time, then we binge-watch Netflix. We say we value time, but then we sit in a Starbucks drive-through line for twenty-five minutes for a cup of coffee. We say we value time, but then we play a video game on our phone for endless hours. We say we value time, and then we promise ourselves that we’ll get to that dream someday. We say we value time, but we toss aside minutes like they are disposable. When we are facing the last seconds of our lives, minutes become precious. The key is to understand their preciousness today when there is still time to make those minutes matter. All you need to do is to stop living for tomorrow or next week or next month or even next year, because a lifetime absent of regret is a lifetime of happiness. I promise you there is not a person in the world who is lying on their deathbed, wishing they had watched a little more TV or played a few more video games or waited just a little while longer to make their dreams come true. But that is often what we do when we decide how we will spend our time: we trade momentary pleasure for long-term happiness. Steve Jobs once said, “Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.” So make every decision count by looking ahead at the one-hundred-year-old version of yourself and asking that version of yourself for some wisdom and perspective. Stop making decisions for the current version of yourself, and ask your future self what they want from you. Listen to your most trustworthy narrator. If you do, I promise that you will be a happier person. You’ll be a more successful person. You’ll be the kind of person you have always wanted to be.