You Need to Let Your Old Self Die

Here's the thing that you have to understand about your brain.

Your brain does not build a future out of nothing.

It builds your future out of your past.

There is a Harvard researcher named Daniel Schacter who spent decades studying this, and what he found is that when you imagine your future, your brain is not creating something new.

It's pulling pieces out of your memory and reassembling them into a version of what's coming up.

And so basically, you're imagining tomorrow, but with pieces of yesterday, which means that your future is literally being built out of the raw material of your past.

Like, think about what that means for a second.

If the only data that your brain has of you is the version of you who quits three weeks into doing something, or the version of you that says "yes" when they mean "no," or the version of you that's broke, or the version of you that's anxious, or the version of you that talks themself like garbage, then that's basically the raw material that your mind has to work with to try to construct your future.

If that's the case, how amazing do you think this future that it's gonna create will be? So, like, when you sit down and you try to imagine an amazing future, your brain goes into your brain's archives, it pulls up who you've been, and then hands you, like, a slightly nicer version of the same damn life.

And so your brain cannot imagine a future if it has no footage of it.

And so you are not creating a new life in this circumstance.

What you're doing is you're recreating the old life with just, like, new decorations.

And so almost 20 years ago, one of my very first mentors said something to me that I still do to this day.

He told me that you need to have a magnificent obsession.

That's what he called it.

Not a goal, not a resolution, an obsession.

A version of yourself that you think about so much, so often, in so much detail, that your brain starts treating that person like a memory instead of a fantasy.

That's the key.

Do you get that? It treats it like a memory, not a fantasy, so therefore it can pull raw data from a memory that happens to be imagined and now construct your future.

And I realize, you know, like, I was already obsessed, but I was just obsessed [laughs] I was obsessed with the wrong guy.

I thought about my failures all day long.

Like, I thought about my insecurities every day.

I rehearsed all of my limitations and all of my limiting fears every single day.

I was devoted to this old version of me.

And so, like, I want you to hear this because I think this might be you, too.