Benjamin P. Hardy Quotes

Every time you choose your Future Self over your current self, there is risk. But being your Future Self now and doing what your Future Self would do immediately creates results beyond anything you’ve done before. Yes, with deliberate practice comes failure. Yes, being in the arena can lead to battle scars. It’s better to fail at the level of your Future Self than succeed as your current self. How much does your schedule reflect your Future Self?

Thankfully, in the real world we don’t literally lose the thing we go into the GAP about. But we do damage it. We damage our own experience. And when it comes to other people, we damage them as well.

There is nothing quite so useless, as doing with great efficiency, something that should not be done at all.

What currently prevents your dreams from becoming reality is buried trauma keeping you trapped in your past, shutting down your confidence and imagination. Sure, trauma occurs as major, life-altering events. But more often, “trauma” is planted in minor incidents and conversations that limit your view of who you are and what you can do, creating a fixed mindset.

Ultimately, there is deeper meaning in the wormholes we experience than appears on the surface. Don’t let what may appear to be a setback become a missed wormhole of opportunity.

The quality of connection you have with your own Future Self determines the quality of your life and behaviors now.

Without a meaningful goal, attempting changes lacks meaning, requires unsustainable willpower, and ultimately leads to failure.

A fundamental aspect of flexibility is what psychologists call pathways thinking, and it’s the ability to find or create many workable paths to a given outcome.10 The more flexible you are as a person, the more willing you’ll be to try multiple approaches to getting where you want to go. The more rigid you are, the more dogmatically you’ll try forcing the same approach even when it proves unsuccessful.

If you want to become your desired Future Self, play at their level as quickly as possible. Commit at the level of your Future Self. Adapt at the level of your Future Self. Your current self is clearly not there yet, and will therefore need serious training, humility, and feedback.

It is not the past, but the future, that drives a person’s actions and behaviors. All goals can be placed in two categories: approach or avoidance. Connected to your Future Self, you can appreciate, embrace, and love the present. Connection to your Future Self creates purpose and meaning in the present. The more connected you are to your longer-term Future Self, the better and wiser your decisions today.

The most fundamental aspect of your humanity is your ability to make choices and stand by those choices, what Viktor Frankl called the last of human freedoms, “To choose one’s own way.” Choosing your own way has at least two key meanings: making decisions about what you want to happen and choosing how you respond to what does happen.

"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."

What if rather than focusing on how long something took, we focused on how far we went?

Pain, discomfort, shock, boredom, impostor syndrome, awkwardness, fear, being wrong, failing, ignorance, looking stupid: Your avoidance of these feelings is stopping you from a life greater than your wildest imagination. These are the feelings that accompany a life of success. And yet, these are the very feelings most often avoided. They are avoided because, as stated previously, most people have developed an extreme avoidance orientation toward life.

You are not a single and narrow “type” of person. In different situations and around different people, you are different.