The ultimate
determinant of our destination in life has less to do with what has happened to
us in the past but more to do with how we are willing to live, going forward.
Now, there are many
things that people engage in with regards to creating a better future. Some
people only think about it, some others only talk about, some more people only
hope about it and others merely wish for it to turn out best.
However, very few
people actually do something about making their future truly awesome. Here, the purpose of this article is to help
you make the leap from the majority of passive dreamers into the minority of
active designers of their own great future.
In the words of
the essayist, George Orwell: “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls
the present controls the past.” To take
control of our entire lives, we must take control of our repeated behaviors
starting now. We can’t afford to merely wish for things to change, if we truly
desire to take complete control of our own success.
Our greatest power
in shaping our results lies in how we choose to live in the present. And those
who decide to live right in the now are the privileged few who have learned the
art of not only taking charge of their future but also having dominion over
their past experience—whether it was predominantly pleasant or significantly dreadful.
To Change Your Destination,
Reset Your Trajectory
We can’t
completely change our lives overnight, but we can change our trajectory
instantly by altering our current pattern of behavior. And this, fundamentally involves
breaking of suboptimal habits and replacing them with super-optimal ones.
So, if we really
want to get better in life, altering our current behavioral pattern is where we
need to channel our efforts on self-improvement. Overcoming bad habits is a key
element of any personal transformation.
By shattering limiting
patterns of behavior that have been holding us back and replacing them with
empowering models that can propel us forward, we will be creating a new
identity of the kind of person we are capable of becoming.
However, if we
keep repeating the same dis-empowering patterns—in spite of our good
intentions—our immediate future is invariably going to be the repetition of
our recent past.
Without new and
better behaviors, we cannot have different and better results. As one writer
puts it, ‘God will not do for you what He does not do through you.’
In a nutshell: to
have the greatest hope for a better tomorrow, we must alter our sub-optimal
pattern of behaviors in the present. In other words, we must develop good
keystone habits now.
Finally, no
matter the glory of our ancestry, the quality of our genes, or our failures and
successes in the past; the quality of our future is going to be the aggregation
of all our habits.
Therefore, we
need to consciously cultivate empowering good habits and consciously eliminate dis-empowering bad ones, going forward.
