Our future should grow as much as our past

If I asked you to look back 10 years and talk about how much you’ve grown, you’d likely have many stories to show your increased compassion, knowledge, income, and many other things.

On the other hand, if I asked you about your potential growth in the next 10 years, most people don’t see themselves changing very much. This is known as the “end of history illusion“.

In a great article in the Harvard Business Review, author Benjamin Hardy shares this thought:

Despite awareness that our past self is clearly different than our present self, we tend to think that who we are right now is the “real” and “finished” version of ourselves, and our future self will be basically the same as who we are today. Gilbert puts it simply: “Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished.”

While I have things that I do every week to help improve myself (reading, this blog, exercise, etc), it’s indeed a fuzzy picture of where I’d like to be in a decade.

Hardy shares some great tips in the article, but I found the biggest to be the idea of changing your identity narrative. In his words:

Your identity narrative is the story you tell about yourself: past, present, and future. If your identity is rooted in your past and present alone, that fixed mindset can make personality feel permanent. But if you focus on envisioning your future self, instead of fixating on your current self, it becomes possible to change your identity narrative.

It’s similar to what Carol Dweck shared in her TED Talk called “The power of believing that you can improve”, seen here:

In her case it was more about helping those that know they’re struggling, but it can apply to all of us. Of course, it doesn’t just happen by itself. You’ll get a little better at things as time goes on, but generally speaking experience isn’t the same as practice. If you want to get better, you need to work on it.

Your future self is not someone you discover, but someone you decide to be. I’m happy with where I am these days, but I hope I’m not the same 10 years from now.