Everyday when we open our eyes, our lives are filled with endless choices. Do we rely on our lizard brain to tell us our processes, to walk us through the minutia, to execute the mundane? Do we utilize our higher thinking to perform meaningful tasks, to build the future we aim to see, and to bring ourselves into the ever-constant now? Likely, we do both. And, equally as likely, the more we focus on the latter, the more we make of ourselves and our lives.
No matter if you’re 4, 40 (***cough cough***) or 104, everyday we receive choices of what we make of our day and what we make of our lives. So, when our brain is flooded to review how we’ve allocated our time and resources, upon our final breathe, our final heartbeat, our true last hoorah, will we feel like we’ve made enough choices that we look back on a life well lived?
When discussing influence, experts often speak of two main drivers - hope for gain or fear of loss - and the real experts combine the two. “Once you sleep with this pillow you’ll never worry about sleeping poorly, again!” “This magic pill will ease your pain, and make you feel better than you’ve ever felt.” But in our daily lives, once our basic needs are fulfilled, we must drive our own persuasion, and become our own fortune tellers.
So, how do we determine our future? By identifying what we’d like the future to hold, what we’d like to gain, what we’d be fearful of losing if we didn’t gain this future, facing ourselves towards our imagined inevitable, developing the habits and nature to accomplish, then waking up everyday realizing that, “Today is the first day of the rest of your life,” and taking action on it.