Whether someone has achieved greatness is often determined by the things that they have done in life. Now ask yourself: what is stopping you from achieving greatness? If you’re anything like me, what keeps you from being the best version of yourself is not your inability to do certain things, but your inability to not do things.The inability to not say yes to a social invitation. The inability to not scroll on our phones the first thing in the morning. The inability to not go to youtube when your mind is bored. That leads us with an alternate definition of greatness: Whether someone has achieved greatness is determined by the things they avoided doing in life.
This pattern of thought is important because we all lust over our vision for the future and more often than not, we have a path that can lead us there.These are often a chain of ‘if you do x by y, I’ll arrive in z.’ But seldom do we think of its inverse. If you don’t stop doing the things you currently do, where will that path take you?
What terrifies me is how the delta between your ideal self and undesirable self increases with time. Let us do a thought exercise. Make up two versions of yourself: one that avoids bad habits, and another that continues the bad habits that you already do. Now picture a graph where the X axis represents time, and Y axis represents success1. The origin is the present you, where both your ideal self and your undesirable self converge. Now, as you move along the x axis, plot where you would be if you stopped all bad habits, and another where you didn’t stop your bad habits.
For the first few months, the differences may not be so obvious. You’d still be relatively close to where you are currently. But project 1 year into the future and you start seeing small but noticeable gaps. But the farther into the future you go, the delta increases. By year 5 your ideal self will be on the path to achieving a lot of the things you said you wanted. By year 10, you will be close. By year 20, perhaps your ideal self will already have accomplished a lot. By year 30, you will be unrecognizable. Your undesirable self may take two routes, stay stagnant, or dwindle down. Either way, the delta is massive.
So I challenge you, and myself, to meditate on this thought least once a day, so we can battle our demons and avoid falling victim to our own bad habits.
1 Your definition.