The Most Clever Way Ever to Compare Yourself With the Best

Design today your future self to finally find your freedom

In the later 1980’s we were highly competitive.

In my neighborhood, there were 60 kids in the street, 24/7, 365, playing soccer, building huts in the trees, riding skateboards, stealing chocolate bars from the mini-market, and kissing hot chicks behind an old building.

We listened to Bruce Springsteen saying:

I was open to pain and crossed by the rain and I walked on a crooked crutch I strolled all alone through a fallout zone and came out with my soul untouched I hid in the clouded wrath of the crowd, but when they said, “Sit down,” I stood up Ooh… growin’ up

Smelling bad, with ripped jeans, and ragged hair.

We were unbeatable.

Yet, despite some of these skills you developed at a young age may be blatantly obvious to you, seems the majority have been lost, hindering your potential, often without you even realizing it.

Over time, we forget who we were. The shit we did without our parents knowing. Shit that we now condemn to our neighbor’s kids, because our chicken memory has already forgotten how it was.

Or maybe we simply don’t want to remember.

Growing old sucks, if you don’t know how to feed the child you once were.

I don’t give a damn when someone sees me making weird stuff with my daughters in the middle of the street.

Cause I know whoever judges me, one of the two is happening:

Or the individual already died for life. Or he’s melted with envy for not having the balls to do the same.

Yet, if you carry your childhood with you, you never become older.

Childhood is the one story that stands by itself in every soul.- Ivan Doig

But what if you don’t remember what was like to be a child?

Can you remember?

The Most Reliable Way to Predict the Future is To Create It

Peak experiences… generate an advanced form of perceiving reality, and are even mystic and magical in their effect upon the experimenter.- Abraham Maslow

One of the best writers on Medium, between 2012–18, was Dr. Benjamin Hardy. I’ve been receiving amounts of free content from him in these last months. And I’m impressed with his ability to compress the quantity of good stuff about self-improvement.

He created a new approach on how to reset and rebuild our mindset.

One of the principles that have been the most important for me, as completing my daily tasks, is Hardy’s approach to our future self.

You have the capacity to design your future self. You must have the ability to understand that your future self 3 years from now is not you. Don’t assume you’ll be the same person.- Dr. Benjamin Hardy

I’ve been profoundly reflecting on these matters for the last days. And it’s been a fun ride because as far as I go on projecting my future self, many memories came to my mind about my past.

Little things, tinny moments, micro-decisions I made, more than 35 years ago, now came to my mind with perfect clairvoyance.

When I was playing in the street with my friends. Running away from pranks I had done. Feelings of pain when I fall down from my bike. The taste of blood in my mouth when I was punched in the face in my first street fight.

As far as I go into my future self, the more I remember and acknowledge my past.

It’s been a new birth for me these last days.

I realize (or remember) the level of a terrorist I was at a young age. My mother uses to say that my parents never made a calm meal in the restaurant when I was around. One of them had to be with me, or I would escape without them noticing, and when they found me, I was already walking around the restaurant kitchen causing terror.

These memories from the past helped me with the way I handle my kids. When they do something bad, I just laugh from inside, cause that was exactly what I did when I was their age. By the way, I would do it even in a more efficient and destructive way.

Projecting your future self makes you win a free journey into your past. It’s like entering into a time machine, that transports you to that magical moments. Those tinny fractions of time when you find yourself in real memorizable moments that stayed recorded in the depths of your subconscious. Moments that defined who you really were.

Cause the future, the future is about to be designed by your two hands.

We Are All In The Gutter, But Some of Us Are Looking To the Stars

When I was 14 years old I finally meet my star.

We all have idols and mine was about to be born. In 1991, 7 years after he was selected to the draft of the NBA, I had the chance to see him on TV. It was the 28th of March 1991 in a game against the Cleveland Cavaliers. Michael Jordan scored 69 points. That was it. I never admired anyone in the sport’s history like MJ.

If someone remembers the impact Jordan had in world sport, with his Airness, his ability, and his competitiveness, it was something the world had never seen before. Nike and Michael Jordan provided the largest partnership in history that projected the two brands across the planet, with an unparalleled impact on a global scale.

Michael won the title of World Champion in 1991, 92, 93, 95, 96, 97.

I saw thousands of hours of recorded tapes of NBA games from the Chicago Bulls. I wanted to be like Mike. His moves, his smile, his style.

However, I started to be like MJ in one particular aspect, that shaped my personality until today.

His competitiveness.

Everybody wanted to defeat Jordan. He was the man to beat. The Bad Boys Detroit Pistons did succeed until 1991. Then came the New York Nicks, then the Portland Trail Blazers, then the Utah Jazz. And all of them fall in the arena.

Michael was the most competitive person I have ever known. And he left a world legacy of people that developed a specific skill of their competitiveness.

Trash talk.

If somebody came to Jordan telling him they could defeat him, he couldn’t do it, he was weak, and so and so, Michael just stayed quiet until the game started.

Then, as MJ starts scoring, he just absolutely destroyed his opponents with his trash talk. Jordan would come near the player who said he was weak and never stop harassing him until the other guy was absolutely destroyed.

Before a game started, Michael Jordan knew he was about to win the games. That was his mindset. And whoever came in his way, he would just destroy them with trash talk.

It was his shield. His weapon.

A powerful one, I can guarantee you. Even today I use it when I need it.

If a friend of mine came to me saying I can’t do this or that, he must be prepared for trash talk. Cause I will destroy him on the field. And I will not stop until I achieve the goal and trash talk him for an entire week or month.

It’s my shield. My weapon.

Like in the streets, when I was young and I had to survive to the older kids. I had to create defenses. Any kid had to have ways to survive.

I found mine.

What about you?

Personality Isn’t Permanent

You are the one who chooses who you’ll become.

One of the myths of personality says you have to understand who you were in the past to project your future self.

Your identity shapes your behavior, and your behavior over time is your personality.

Yet, you must separate the deconstruction of your past as a journey that shaped your identity, to a new concept called prospection.

Prospection is the perception that your future shapes your identity, not your past.

Human beings have a lot of difficulties to project the future. Cause it’s something we can’t see. The past is there, in our memory, and we can go see it if we want. However, the future is not there yet. And our mindset was not trained to prospection.

Quite the opposite. We were taught to look back and victimize what we could have done and didn’t do.

A perfect example of prospection is Elon Musk. We projected his future self with the idea of dying on Mars. It’s his dream. And everything he is doing with one of his companies, SpaceX, is projected in his prospection. Projected on his ability to shape his own future self.

Without knowing, we make cognitive commitments, as Elon Musk did in his mind.

However, we also create identity capital. Identity capital is the idea that your behavior, the things you accomplished give you a sense of identity. It’s the knowledge that you have of things you did in the past and the certainty that you can keep accomplish them again.

So you can grab your identity capital, grab your prospection, and turn your future into something inevitable.

Cause your personality isn’t permanent. You can reshape it whenever you decide.

It’s on your hands. It always had and always will be.

Final Thoughts

Don’t forget who you are.

But more important, don’t forget who you will be 3 years from now.

Be aware that you are already wealthy. You have your identity capital in your pocket.

You just need to start training your mind in projecting the future. It’s hard, it takes time, but it is the only way to become truly free.

Free from your past and free to redraw your future.

Thank you,

Nuno