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Be your future self now
Dr Benjamin Hardy
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What is Be your future self now about?
Be Your Future Self shows you how to envision the person you want to be, and then how to become that person now.
Key ideas of Be your future self now
Your future pulls the present
Humans are uniquely capable of imagining a different future self, and that imagined identity shapes today's behavior more than past experience does.
Your Future Self is a stranger
Research shows most people treat their Future Self like an unfamiliar person, which is why they let that stranger absorb debt, poor health, and broken commitments.
Act from identity, not toward it
Lasting change happens when you inhabit your intended future identity first and let circumstances and habits follow, rather than waiting to feel ready.
Read an excerpt from the summary
The Boy Who Filmed His Future
On October 4, 2015, a seventeen-year-old in North Carolina ditched his eleventh-grade history test and locked himself in a bedroom. He had an idea that sounded ridiculous even to himself. He set up a camera and recorded four short videos addressed to people who did not exist yet: himself six months later, twelve months later, five years later, ten years later. Each video was about two minutes long. He scheduled them to publish automatically on the exact future dates. At that moment Jimmy Donaldson had eight thousand subscribers and one and a half million lifetime views, and his goal for the six-month video was a number he thought was insane: fifteen thousand subscribers. Twenty thousand, he said to the camera, would be crazy.
When the five-year video unlocked itself in October 2020, MrBeast had more than forty million subscribers, a thirty-person team, annual revenue past a hundred million dollars, and a stunt list that included counting to a hundred thousand on a livestream over forty hours and giving ten thousand dollars to a homeless man. The five-year video, recorded by a boy who had skipped a quiz, ends with that boy hoping he has one million subscribers when he watches it. The version of him who watched it had forty-four times that.
This is the engine of Benjamin Hardy's book, and it is doing more work than it appears. Hardy is not making the point that visualization is powerful. He is making a stranger point: that the future does not arrive at the present, the future pulls the present toward it, and the person you will be in twenty years is already shaping what you do right now whether you have introduced yourself to him or not.
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Continue in the appWho is it for?
- Anyone who keeps putting off long-term goals in favor of short-term relief.
- Anyone who feels disconnected from who they want to become in five or ten years.
- Anyone who wants a coherent framework for aligning daily decisions with a bigger life vision.
- Anyone who suspects they are settling but cannot pinpoint why or what to do about it.
About the author: Dr Benjamin Hardy
Benjamin Hardy is an organizational psychologist and bestselling author whose work focuses on personality change, goal-setting, and the psychology of identity. He completed his PhD at Clemson University and has published multiple books, including titles co-written with Dan Sullivan of Strategic Coach.
Hardy draws heavily on psychological research, including the work of Daniel Gilbert, Hal Hershfield, and Viktor Frankl, and writes from direct personal experience as a foster-care adoptive parent and entrepreneur. He is one of the most widely read writers on Medium on topics of self-improvement and human potential.
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