5 Questions You Should Ask Your Current Self to Become Your Future Self
Who do you want to become?
One of the biggest misconceptions in life is that being busy indicates productivity and that engaging in activities leads to results.
However, this notion is flawed because most busy individuals are unable to measure their progress or results accurately. It is easy to measure busyness by simply stating that one is busy. However, measuring productivity and results is more challenging as it requires tangible evidence of progress and outcomes.
Busy Is Not a Badge of Honor
In the last ten years, I noticed that the word busy is becoming a badge of honor, a default response to every question you ask anyone. It is being used as an ego boost disguised as a complaint.
I recently challenged a client of mine who is always busy. I asked her, “Are you busy or tired?” When I asked her the question, she stood silently for a few seconds before agreeing and said: “I’m ambitious. I have to keep going. I have to do this.”
She was conditioned to work hard, but when I sat with her and asked her a few more questions, she knew she was not busy. She was tired because she focused on the wrong priorities that were not creating progress.
Real progress gives you a real advantage because few people focus on it.
Let me share a few questions you need to ask yourself to create work worth sharing and real progress in your life.
1- What Are You Focusing On?
In a world deluged by irrelevant information, clarity is power. — Yuval Noah Harari
The Pareto Principle
If your to-do list is a mile long, you won’t be able to create real progress. Progress happens when you understand the 80/20 rule.
The 80/20 rule is also known as the Pareto principle, which means that 80% of your results come from 20% of your effort. The Pareto principle was named after an Italian economist, Vilfredo Pareto, who discovered that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population, and the same pattern applies to everything he studied.
This framework works. It helps you determine the top 20 % of activities that drive your 80 % of results. Focus your energy on what brings you joy and creates real progress in your life.
How to apply the 80/20 rule to your life?
- List the top 10 activities you spend the most time on.
- What are the top 2 activities that drive 80 % of your results?
- Look at the other 8; do the following: automate what you can, delegate what you should, and eliminate the rest.
2- Do You Have an Action Plan?
“A goal without a plan is just a wish.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
An action plan is crucial in achieving goals because it will help you stay on track, motivated, and focused on your top 20 % of activities.
An action plan will be your scoreboard to monitor your progress and give you daily action steps to get things done.
How to create an action plan:
- Define what success looks like. What would make you feel that the project was successful at the end of the day or project?
- Create SMART goals. Create specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound goals.
- Use technology to help you stay on track: an app, excel worksheet, or any other productivity tool.
- Think about resources, people, time, energy, money, and space.
Stay on track
Gill Corkindale wrote a great article in Harvard Business Review to help you keep your action plan on track. She pointed out two things you can do today to keep you on track.
- Keep a journal to keep yourself accountable.
- Hire a coach or mentor, or surround yourself with an accountability group.
3- Are You Taking Daily Action?
“The path to success is to take massive, determined actions.” ―Tony Robbins
Procrastination is the number one reason why people do not take action. According to Dr. Neil Flore, “Procrastination is a mechanism for coping with the anxiety associated with starting or completing any task or decision….”
Dr. Flore warns you about a few things that can prevent you from taking action:
- Being unrealistic or unspecific about goals. Being vague doesn’t serve your will
- Being unspecific about time. Don’t say, “I will start the project next week,” be more specific about the time.
- Low self-esteem procrastination helps you protect your self-worth and relieve your deeper fears.
- Fear of judgment, this fear stems from identifying ourselves with our accomplishments.
The above items prevent you from taking action because you focus on the outcome instead of progress and growth.
Dr. Katy Milkman has done a lot of research on combating procrastination. She agrees with Dr. Neil Flore that procrastination results from favoring the present moment and choosing distraction over long-term goals.
Commitment Devices
Dr. Milkman came up with two methods to overcome procrastination. She called them commitment devices. They constrain your ability to prioritize short-term pleasure over long-term goals.
- Cash commitment devices require you to create a financial incentive to meet your goal by placing money on the line that you forfeit if you fail.
- Public pledge devices require you to publicly declare what you are trying to achieve and ask people to hold you accountable.
These two methods will stop procrastination and create real progress in your life.
4- How Do You Handle Failure?
“Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It’s quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure. You are thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn’t at all. You can be discouraged by failure — or you can learn from it. ” — Tom Watson, founder of IBM
Everyone will fail, and you will, too.
I hope I didn’t surprise you. If you want to run a marathon, you may fail. If you’re going to start a new business, you may fail, and failure feels horrible.
This horrible feeling makes people avoid trying new things, but if you want to grow and make real progress, make more mistakes. Embrace failure, and commit to double your rate of failure.
Focus on Growth
Vishen Lakhiani has a great way to shift your focus from failure to progress and growth. He says, “Your work is not about your work. Rather, your work is nothing more than your greatest vehicle for your evolution.”
Lakhiani encourages you to ask yourself this question after every success or failure, “Did I grow?” Then, when growth becomes your focus, you won’t care about failure or success. Instead, you care about development and progress.
How to deal with failure:
- Acknowledge failure, but don’t dwell on it. Instead, focus on your top priorities, have an action plan, stop procrastinating, and go to work.
- Ask yourself, “Did I grow?” Then, focus on learning from your mistakes and try to avoid them in the future.
- Own your failure. Take full responsibility for everything. The easiest way to create progress is to own your failure and move forward.
- Commit to working on your top priorities for 3 hours daily for 30 days.
- Measure your progress, pivot, and keep moving forward.
5- Do You Know How To Say No?
Just saying yes because you can’t bear the short-term pain of saying no is not going to help you do the work. — Seth Godin
Suppose you want to create real progress. Learn how to say no. Don’t worry about hurting other people’s feelings. Instead, focus on doing work that creates value for everyone.
I’m just like you. I don’t like to say no, but I once heard a quote from Jules Renard that changed my perspective, “The truly free man is the one who can turn down an invitation to dinner without giving an excuse.” I used to want to justify every no I said; now, I don’t care. No is no.
Saying yes all the time puts other people’s priorities before yours. You will end up doing too much and drain all of your energy. As a result, you won’t achieve much, and you won’t create progress in your life.
How to say no:
- Learn how to respectfully say no, “I’m sorry, I can’t do this because I have other engagements and priorities now.”
There is no reason to give you more ways to say no. Just say no.
If you ask yourself these five questions often, you will create real progress and work worth sharing with others.
- What are you focusing on?
- Do you have an action plan?
- Do you take daily action?
- How do you handle failure?
- Do you know how to say no?
