You know this already but: the past doesn’t exist anymore, the future will never exist, and so, really, all you have is right now. This present moment.
But if I had to choose between living in the past, and living in the future, I’d take the future every time.
Sure, I mean learn from the past, extract its lessons and look back on all the great times you’ve had with fondness, but you can’t live there. As executive coach Dan Sullivan says, you have to always make sure that your future is bigger than your past.
Successful people are always analyzing what they could have done better in the past, looking for the lesson and crystallizing the wisdom, but they don’t stay in the past. They use the past to set themselves up for a better future.
Your past is what it was, but your future is what you’ll fashion it into.
A legendary business leader who understands this more than most is John C. Maxwell, author of Success is a Choice, the book where the subtitle of this articles comes from.
It’s a fantastic little book (it’s shorter than 200 pages, and so you can probably finish it in a day), and I’ve written a complete breakdown that you can read much faster (and for free), but I’ll just lay out a few of the Key Ideas right here to give you an idea:
#1: Change Your Beliefs, Change Your Life
“Personal breakthroughs begin with a change in your beliefs. Why? Because your beliefs determine your expectations, and your expectations determine your actions. A belief is a habit of mind in which confidence becomes a conviction that we embrace.”
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#2: When You Think of Limits, You Create Them
“Your potential is really up to you. It doesn’t matter what others might think. It doesn’t matter where you came from. It doesn’t even matter what you might have believed about yourself at a previous time in your life. It’s about what lies within you and whether you can bring it out.”
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#3: Make Yourself Bigger
“Prior to his success on Everest, Hillary had been part of another expedition, in which the team not only had failed to reach the summit but also had lost one of its members.
At a reception for the expedition members in London, Hillary stood to address the audience. Behind the platform was a huge photograph of Everest. Hillary turned to face the image of the mountain and exclaimed, ‘Mount Everest, you have defeated us. But I will return. And I will defeat you. Because you cannot get any bigger, and I can.”
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#4: Set Yourself Apart
“Just knowing what you want to do and then making an effort to pursue it distinguishes you from almost everybody else.”
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There’s so much incredible stuff in Maxwell’s book, including dozens and dozens of awesome notes I took, but just realize that your biggest accomplishments and your brightest days are AHEAD of you, and that’s where you have to look for them and ultimately find them.
All the best,
Matt Karamazov
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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From The Good Men Project on Medium
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