How to Live Your Ideal Future Now

From inertia to action. Live driven by your passion

Inertia: When things last longer than they should.

That was my daily piece of wisdom. A graffitied quote in a wall somewhere in the middle of Montevideo’s streets (Uruguay).

Urban Wisdom Can Make a Difference.

It was a one-hour bus drive to my work every day. The bus was packed, and vendors would hop on at one bus stop to try and sell their products to the passengers and hop off in the next one, where another seller would be waiting his turn to jump in.

Sometimes they would come with something useful, like bottles of water. But most of the time, they were selling exactly the same item at the same price, shamelessly shouting: “recently seized at customs!”

I always felt sorry for the poor fella paying for a container of things that would never make it through the custom, and would see his products undersold in the buses all around the country.

No matter how long I lived in South America, I never got used to that tradition of selling in public transport. You just wanted to get to your job, and your bus became a moving market with people shouting in your ears.

Then RyanAir started doing the same in their flights, and the transport in Europe lost its elegance or peace. I still can’t understand the marketing behind it.

When things last longer than they should.

It wasn't easy to try and concentrate on my thoughts with so many things happening around me. But that quote was always there, waiting for me to make a huge impact. It became my daily reflection:

On what things I am being carried away by inertia?

I thought of all those break-ups and divorces around me. All of us would say, “things weren’t well for a while; we could have split one year earlier.”

I can say that most of my break-ups were for reasons that I knew since the very first day we met. I honestly couldn't admit it to myself. I could have avoided a few bad relationships should I have listened to my inner voice, but hey, life is learning progress.

Quitting a job is another similar situation. We get burned out and stay there for months or even years, waiting for a change that will not come.

Change Can Be Scary

Inertia is the hidden face of fear to change. Our minds love to have everything under control; we love our comfort zone; it feels so… comfortable? in here.

The funny thing is, we should rephrase the concept. Because when I think of something comfortable, I visualize a fluffy, warm couch. As soon as it breaks or some springs start popping out, I describe it as uncomfortable and change it.

Sometimes our comfort zone is far from comfortable.

We don’t do that with our emotional comfort zone. We spend months in discomfort, still thinking: as long as we remain within the limits of the known, there’s no need to change things; maybe we can improve them a little bit.

We know deep inside that we are not happy, that we have to change some things. We know that it’s not normal to fight every day with our partner, go to our job feeling miserable, or have bad habits that are killing us. We feel guilty but do nothing to change it.

We drift in our inertia in the hope that everything will be okay in the end.

From Inertia to Action.

Here is what I do to go from an unhappy apathy to owning my life. It’s an old coach’s trick. I ask myself every morning a couple of questions:

How do I see myself three years from now? What would make my life amazing?

When we play to visualize our happy future, we focus on the positive things we want to achieve, but we also keep the positive things we currently have. Happiness is adding more good stuff on top of what we already love.

Whatever we don’t see in that beautiful future, and we are currently dealing with, are the things that we don’t feel happy about. Simple as that.

Once we detect those situations/people/things that are draining our energy, it is the moment to reflect on them and take action. If they are worth it, we should make some effort to improve them, but if not, maybe it’s an excellent opportunity to get rid of them.

Life is short; we should put all our energy into what makes us smile. We can grow every day; we can fill our time with meaningful things that make us happy.

We can choose to be driven by our passions.

How about you? Do you have any tricks to be fully aligned with your ideal future?