Why Your Perfect Mentor is Your Future Self (From the Multiverse)
Many of us flail through life without a north star to guide us. When it comes to making big, life-altering decisions, we're paralyzed by the sheer number of choices and their implications. We're often at the mercy of our current mood. Feeling agitated? Screw it, it wouldn't work out anyway. Feeling elated? It's a long shot, but I'm feeling lucky.
Wouldn't it be great to have the perfect mentor guiding us through our chaotic life? One that understood us in our entirety and knew of our loftiest dreams and goals? One that was always there when we needed them most, whether under deadline or mid-crisis? One that had an over-abundance of confidence that we could tap into whenever ours flagged?
To walk through life with such a mentor would be a competitive advantage, in both work and life; it would change the trajectory of our lives.
Lucky for us, that perfect mentor is ourselves.
Allow me to introduce you to your future self
How can we reliably tap into the wisdom of our future self? Is it even possible?
I used to have the same concerns. It's easy to brush off the idea of your future self when it's ill-formed and lacks believability. But if we can satisfy those two criteria, we have the beginnings of a beautiful relationship with ourselves.
When we take our future-self seriously, it leads to lasting change in our habits.
Professor Hershfield and his team conducted a study in which they showed two groups of participants images of themselves, before asking them to make a financial decision. One group was exposed to an image of their current-aged self, while the other group saw a processed image that approximated what they would look like at the time of retirement. After viewing this image of themselves in virtual reality, they were asked to allocate a percentage of their future income as savings for retirement. On average, the group that stood "face to face" with their older retired self, saved 41% more than their peers in the control group.
If our future self can help us save 41% more for retirement after a single encounter - then what else could they help us do?
The perfect mentor
A great mentor knows us well, has already achieved a level of success we wish to replicate, and is someone who resembles us - the more self-similarity the better. We're cultural animals, and we learn best from people most like ourselves. We're automatically and unconsciously drawn to people of similar sex, temperament, and ethnicity. If we pick role models that look nothing like us, our subconscious will begin to plant the seeds of doubt. When we run into challenges of great difficulty, our differences with our mentor fuel our insecurities and excuses.
This makes our future selves one of the best people we could ever learn from. They're also readily available at a moment's notice.
Talking to our future selves (across the multiverse)
I first learned of this useful exercise from Tim Ferriss. He goes over this prompt on his podcast while interviewing Josh Waitzkin, "Imagine that you're suddenly the older version of you - 5, 10, or 15 years in the future. If you sat down over wine or coffee with the current, younger you, what advice or observations might you offer?"
I tried using this exercise, and imagined my future self achieving all of the success I wished to one day have... but my future self had imposter syndrome. It wasn't quite believable for me. Then I thought back to one of my favorite childhood movies: The One, starring Jet Li.
The movie may only have a 5.9 on IMDb, but it had some amazing action sequences, and it introduced me to the idea of the multiverse. Today, more and more scientists are warming up to the idea that the multiverse may not just be possible, but inevitable. The theory states that our universe is not the only one out there, and that there are, in fact, an infinite number of universes.
The implications of having an infinite number of universes go way beyond the scope of this article and my knowledge of the matter. But we could take it to essentially mean that there is a version of ourselves out there in the multiverse that is living any possible kind of life we can imagine, and an infinite number of lives we can't.
This means there is a version of myself somewhere out there that will in fact be the President of the United States, an astronaut, a Grammy-winning musical artist, and the CEO of a company that dwarfs Amazon + Apple combined. In the multiverse, whatever I can imagine for myself will be true in one of the universes out there.
This means there are a certain set of decisions and actions a version of me will have taken to accomplish anything I could possibly imagine.
So now when I do this exercise, I talk to the specific version of my future self who was able to successfully progress from where I am today, to the exact future I imagine. To me, this takes it out of the realm of the theoretical, and it places it squarely into the inevitable. Now, I don't believe it's inevitable I can recreate the success of my alternate self, but if I ask my future self the right kinds of questions, I increase the likelihood of achieving similar success.
Now that our future self is mentoring us, what should we talk about?
Now that we've conjured forth our successful future self, plucked from the multiverse, what do we talk about? The two most important topics to discuss are The How and The Why.
The How
I want my future self to look backwards and identify the most pivotal decisions and actions they took that got them where they are. What do these pivotal decisions look like? They will likely involve one of the following:
High leverage decisions: A decision that makes dozens of other decisions unnecessary or irrelevant (I previously wrote about managing your leverage here).
High impact decisions that are irreversible: These are decisions that leave a lasting imprint on our lives. Decisions that define us — where we live, what career we pursue, who we spend our lives with, etc.
Decision pitfalls: Where are we making decisions that limit our choices unnecessarily? What are the decisions we should never make or delay for as long as possible?
I also like having my future self run a "pre-mortem" for me, or an "after action report" for them. I would ask them, "with the benefit of hindsight, what were the most important disasters they managed to avoid, prevent, or mitigate?"
One more question to ask is, "what are the key habits and behaviors that got you to where you are?" These are the habits we'll need to start right away. They will become the foundation required to build atop any future success.
The Why
While we’re sure to get some great insights about the how, what’s even more core to this experience is asking the why.
The Why is the perfect opportunity to take stock of the differences in beliefs and mindset between our alternate self and our present self. The How gives us the tactics. The Why is about unearthing the empowering beliefs we need to adopt and the limiting beliefs we need to discard in order to succeed.
This can be simple but profound. I ask them, "what were the stories you grounded yourself in? The stories you turned to again and again?” These are the stories we’ve leaned on, that have helped us persevere through the most difficult obstacles we’ve faced. “What were the stories you had to believe about yourself, about others, and about the world? And the inverse - what were the stories about yourself, others, and the world that you had to let go?"
How do we interact with ourselves?
We can take a page out of the NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) playbook by conducting our own modified version of their Sage Advice process (h/t Thomas Najar):
Sit across from an empty chair. Close your eyes, relax, and breathe slowly and deeply. Begin to think of your future self.
Let an image of your future self form in the chair in front of you (if you need help forming this image, Snapchat’s Old lens works eerily well). This future self knows everything about you, your past and potential future. They look at you with complete understanding, acceptance, and love. Be sure to notice their posture, breath, and how they hold themselves.
Ask a question or two that only this future you could answer (silently or out loud). But don’t let them answer yet.
Keeping your eyes closed, leave your younger body in your chair as you gently stand up and sit back down into the chair across from you and become your future self. Take on their posture and breathing style.
Now that you are your future self, answer the questions of your younger self. Allow yourself to add anything else you think your younger self needs to know.
Gently leave the body of your future self and return to your younger body. Take the time to listen and to contemplate the wisdom given to you by your future self.
Thank your future self.
Giving ourselves permission
Once we have The How and The Why, it's a matter of taking the advice of our future self. The primary blocker that stops us from implementing advice, whether it's from ourselves, peers, or experts, is the friction new behaviors create with our existing identity.
Any new behavior by definition is "not us" historically speaking. In order for us to act not as ourselves but like someone else, we need permission. Maybe this permission comes from a parent, from a coach, a teacher, or mentor. But our brains usually require permission from someone else we respect in order to begin acting like someone else.
When you ask people what advice they would give to their younger self, it's almost never tactical advice - instead, it’s centered around permission. To let their younger self know that it's okay to fail, to not be so concerned about what others think, to give yourself permission to chase your curiosities. We desperately want our younger self to realize the box we confine ourselves to and operate within is a figment of our imagination, a self-imposed prison.
In our dialogue with our future self, we can now have that conversation. They've already explained the tactics and the beliefs, the last step is for them to give us permission to follow through on The How and to internalize The Why.
So do yourself a favor and let your much wiser, kinder, and more successful future self from another universe give you the permission to think and act like them. In the multiverse, it's inevitable you will accomplish those things - so why not this universe?
