What Would A Better You Do?
Dream of a better version of you, and then do what that person would do every day
There’s a lot of truth to this. Think of yourself, but as a better, more confident, and more courageous version of yourself. Then ask what would that better version of me do in X situation? Would that cool version of me avoid chatting with that good looking guy? Would the cool version of me watch a marathon of bad Netflix shows or do something productive?
There is the old story trope of “the power to do it was in you all along!” but that trope exists for a good reason. If you can dream of yourself being a certain way–a better version of yourself–then you can begin to act on that in the moment to moment of living. You are not a “type” of person sentenced to remain stagnant for life. What you want to be and choose to do defines you. In other words, “your behavior determines what kind of person you are, and not the other way around”.
When you dream a better version of you it’s easier and feels far more attainable than looking at someone else you want to emulate. You, but better, is a realistic and believable achievement. That other guy isn’t you and you will never be him. It’s going to be harder to imagine what he does is attainable.
This is essentially what visualization techniques are. By visualizing the kind of person you want to be you have made a decision that It’s not who you are that will determine what you do today, it’s the kind of person you want to be that will determine what you do today. Arnold Schwarzenegger swears by visualization techniques, and it’s hard to argue against him considering where he started in life and what he became:
“Before I go any further, I recognize that this sounds like a lot of woo-woo manifestation mumbo jumbo, like The Secret and all those law of attraction books being peddled by bullshit artists. This isn’t that. I’m not saying if you just visualize what you want, then it will come true. Hell no. You have to plan and work and learn and fail and then learn and work and fail some more. That’s just life. Those are the rules.
What I am saying is that if you want your vision to stick, if you want to increase the chances of success looking exactly like you hoped it would when you first figured out what you wanted your life to look like, then you need to get crystal clear on that vision and tattoo it to the inside of your eyelids. You need to SEE IT.”
Arnold Schwarzenegger, Be Useful
Do you want to be the kind of person who writes every day? Write for just two minutes every day and worry about how much you’re writing later. The point isn’t to write a lot, it’s to create a habit of writing every day. We want to turn you from who you are today, into the kind of person who writes every day. We’ll worry about turning you into the kind of person who is a published author later. For now it’s just getting into that first habit of writing every day.
Habits
The most important requirement to make this work is to have a sense of curiosity. Habits both good and bad are rarely created or broken by raw willpower. What actually breaks or makes habits feeling curious about what you are doing and feeling in the moment. Habits are the result of your brain’s ability to automate behaviors. Even when you don’t want to do a habit anymore it’s hard to break it precisely because your brain ingrains it as an automated behavior based on the cues you get from the environment and what you feel in the moment. You go on auto-pilot and begin to binge eat or play ten hours of video games when you feel a certain way or pick up a cue of seeing chocolate or an ad.
You probably know the feeling. You don’t want to do a certain habit but you find yourself falling into it without realizing you're doing it. You’ll decide to have two chips, then somehow an hour has passed watching TV and the whole bag is gone. Curiosity, and a desire to explore your own mind and moment to moment thinking is how to break this. Catch yourself wondering what you are doing at the moment and just be curious and exploratory about your own behavior.
As you’re eating those chips, notice that you are doing and think about what you are feeling and ask, without judgment, whether the better version of you would be doing this right now. Just noticing and being curious, even without judgment, will snap you out of that moment to moment flow of a habit, and visualizing the kind of person you want to be will remind you why the habit you’re doing is, in a sense, not you. You are that better person, but you need to be reminded of it.
The Capacity to Dream
To make this process work requires accepting something you might be uncomfortable with: you are more malleable than you think. Understand that this ability to change, when driven by your own will, is a uniquely human ability. No other animal can decide it wants to change its behavior and status, and then enact a plan to do it. That use of will is beyond their capability. Only humans can visualize, or maybe it’s better to say, dream, the kind of person we want to be, and make it happen. That is not to say that we are wholly in control, but we are far more than any animal which does not have the capacity to dream of a future and plan long term beyond what its instincts tell it for surviving from one season to the next.
You can plan to become the kind of person who will develop their skills and advance a career. A dog can’t choose to learn new tricks to improve its chances of a better retirement in a different home. You can dream of yourself being a different kind of person and behaving in a different way. No animal can do that.
Anyone can dream of becoming a better version of themselves, but it ultimately doesn’t matter if you aren’t acting on it. Thankfully acting on it doesn’t demand an immediate overhaul of your life. This is why curiosity and exploration are so vital in this process. Ask yourself how the better version of you would do each little task and how that person would spend their day. Your current external situation–how wealthy you are, whether you are single or married, whether you have a good career or not–does not determine whether you are the better version of yourself. The best version of yourself will take whatever your external situation is, and find a way to work within those limitations or make them better.
Make a habit of being a better version of yourself, and use that habit to make your life better. Just don’t beat yourself up when you have setbacks and failures and struggle to enact that dream of a better you. Habits are deeply ingrained and always difficult to break. The current you, with all its years of ingrained habits and behaviors will need practice and effort to change. Don’t expect to go to the gym and immediately start bench pressing like someone who has been pushing their limits regularly every week for a year. You’ll need to exercise your muscles to get to that point. The same goes for your habits and behaviors. You’ll need to start exercising the better version of you.
I think we’ll end this with something profound someone recently told me when I described this article to him: “Hell is where you meet the person you could have been.” It’s ok to be satisfied with who you are today. It’s also ok not to be satisfied and to try and be better.