If you’ve ever browsed the various self-improvement subreddits, you’ll often come across some pretty good advice - a lot of questionable stuff for sure too - but either way, I remember coming across one of the most helpful nuggets of wisdom I’ve ever come across. And that is this:
Do your future self favors.
I can’t remember which subreddit I found it in, but it changed my life. Despite being such a simple concept, “doing our future self favors” is something a lot of us don’t do very often.
But that’s dumb, because, if you think about it, you currently are your past self’s future self. And don’t you wish your past self did some more things for you? Like saved some more money, or kept up with the laundry so that you’d have some clean clothes to wear today?
If past you could have just buckled up, dealt with a little bit of discomfort, and took care of business, your current life would be better because of it.
But the only problem is that this rarely happens, because we don’t think of our future self as the same person. In fact, studies have shown that when thinking of our future self - the same part of the brain lights up that does when we think of other people. Our brain literally processes the idea of our future self like some other, more motivated person who doesn’t mind taking care of all the crap we don’t currently want to deal with. We make his life more difficult by pushing off tasks for him to deal with, not really cluing into the fact that soon enough - that’s stuff that we’re going to have to deal with. Our future life will eventually just be our current life.
So if you don’t want your life to get progressively worse, stop doing that. Stop shooting yourself in the foot, and start tackling tasks now.
Start doing things right now that you know you should do. Even little things. If your garbage is full, take out the garbage. If you have an annoying email you have to write, write it. When that one little errand you have to run pops in your mind, do it. Because this list of responsibilities you have isn’t actually endless, you’re just making it endless by leaving it to your future self all the time. If you start taking care of things the minute they come into your head, then you won’t have do deal with them ever again.
And once you finally complete that list, why stop there?
Why not pick the outfit you’re gonna wear tomorrow, or iron all your dress shirts so that when you need to go run off to a job interview randomly and unpredictably, you’ll be good to go. Hell, next time you buy a chocolate bar, buy another one and keep it in your cupboard for when future you has a really bad day. You get the idea - Make life awesome for future you.
Because eventually, that will just be you. You’ll be more organized, less stressed, and you’ll just have a more smooth running and headache free life overall. By constantly doing your future self favors, you’re setting yourself up for success, and gradually trending your life in an upward direction.
TLDR: Video
Submitted October 30, 2017 at 01:48AM by Top250 http://ift.tt/2gJZyou
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