Benjamin P. Hardy Quotes

By seeing your Future Self as a different person, you appreciate that this person sees things differently than you do now. They care about different things than you do now. They’d act differently than you would now.

Because we’re disconnected from our Future Selves, we opt for near immediate goals or dopamine hits. This short-term seeking ends up costing our Future Selves big.

[Example of this, from comedian Jerry Seinfeld]
Late at night, I think, “Well, it’s night, I’m having a good time, I don’t want to go to sleep. I’m Night Guy. Getting up after five hours’ sleep? That’s Morning Guy’s problem. Let him worry about that. I’m Night Guy, I’ve got to party.”
Then you get up after five hours of sleep, you’re cranky, you’re exhausted.
Night Guy always screws Morning Guy.

growing up so poor that for a time his family lived in their Volkswagen van on a relative’s lawn, Jim Carrey believed in his future. Every night in the late 1980’s, Carrey would drive atop a large hill that looked down over Los Angeles and visualize directors valuing his work. At the time, he was a broke and struggling young comic. One night in 1990, while looking down on Los Angeles and dreaming of his future, Carrey wrote himself a check for $10 million and put in the notation line “for acting services rendered.” He dated the check for Thanksgiving 1995 and stuck it in his wallet. He gave himself five years. And just before Thanksgiving of 1995, he got paid $10 million for Dumb and Dumber.

People naturally avoid investing in loss. It’s comfortable doing something you can already do. Winning feels good. But if you want to aggressively become your Future Self, then investing in loss is how you get there.

Personality — like passion, inspiration, motivation, and confidence — is a by-product of your decisions in life.

The more you put your Future Self in debt in terms of health, learning, finances, and time, the more painful and costly will be the eventual toll. There will be a lot of interest to pay if you continually accrue debt. Everything you do can be categorized as either a cost to or an investment in your Future Self. Costing your Future Self means you’re more focused on present or short-term rewards over long-term consequences. Costing your Future Self means you’re consuming far more than you’re creating. Every little action adds up. A cost makes you less healthy in some way, whether mentally, emotionally, spiritually, relationally, or physically. If repeated, costs make you fatter, lazier, hazier, and less connected. A cost is something that comes to control you, rather than you controlling it.

Albert Einstein correctly said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”26 When you appreciate that your Future Self will be a totally different person than you are today, then you free yourself of needing to be perfect or finished now. Your current self is radically temporary and fleeting.

When the goal is merely to “get through” the day as quickly as possible, life will pass full of regrets. Time becomes the great taskmaster when it should be the liberator. His time is endured rather than enjoyed. He is often late and constantly missing the moments that matter most — caught in the vacuum of time-acceleration toward death without any perceived way of slowing it down.

How would my Future Self feel, and what would they do [with my time], if the [20 years in the future version of me] could come back and live my life for the rest of today?

Hope is: a clear and specific goal agency thinking. Belief you have control over what you do, that your actions matter, and you can impact the results in your life.10 pathways thinking. You see a path, have a path, or can create multiple paths from where you are now to your goal.

"Labels can serve goals, but goals should never serve labels. When a goal serves a label, you've made the label your ultimate reality, and you've created a life to prove or support that label. You see this when someone says, "I'm pursuing this because I'm an extrovert." This form of goal-setting occurs when you base your goals on your current persona rather than setting goals that expand upon and change who you are."

The fastest way to move forward in life is not doing more. It starts with stopping the behaviors holding you back.

She needs to decide what she wants and begin moving forward. With progress — even minuscule progress — her clarity and confidence will increase, opening the door for greater flexibility and change.

Sadly, people today not only spend the time they have, they also spend away their futures. To accrue debt is to sell away our future time.

Unfortunately, when you’ve lost your confidence as a result of pleasure-seeking, it can be difficult to reach out and get social support. You’ll probably try to convince yourself that you must first kick your addiction before you can reach out to people. After all, who would want to be in a relationship with you right now? As a result, you resort to willpower in attempts of clawing your way out of your addiction, all the while remaining isolated from the very people who could help you.