"Had I known then" is followed by some kind of a wish of fortune telling.

• "Had I known the winning lottery number!"
• "Had I known my hometown's property value would quadruple!"
• "Had I known my spouse was going to cheat on me!"

I'm going to be honest: I spent a lot of time in my life thinking these thoughts too.
The most common story I tell to young adults is, I didn't know there was a field of study called linguistics.
Had I known linguistics was a thing in high school, I think I would have had much more direction in my studies.
I would have a better sense of where my future would go, and that would have given me a lot of ease.
So I advise young adults to look through the catalog of studies for any university to see what the future can hold for them.

Now, as much as I'm a fan of my own advice, I think that isn't the complete picture of thinking about the future.
We fall into a common pitfall when it comes to thinking about the future. Here's how it unfolds step by step:

1. There are pieces of knowledge about the world we can learn to better aid our future.
2. There are pieces that can't be known about the future.
   1. Therefore, we fall into naivete and mindlessly hope for the best.
   2. OR we fall into cynicism and believe that nothing will work out for us.
3. Outside of the above two options, it's time and effort-consuming to continuously wander about the future.

Well, shit. That was a bit hard to understand even for me. So let me paint a picture with an example.

If I had known I was going to marry my wife, would I have done something differently when I was dating her?
Of course! I'd definitely NOT do certain actions that still cause a lot of embarrassment for me today.
I wouldn't say some things that caused a lot of hurt for her, and so on and so forth.
So, I could keep going about the woulda shoulda coulda but what's the point?
It's just dreaming of things that can never be. It ends up becoming a waste of time, an abandoning of my own past.

But let's think about this. What if I had known that my marriage was going to be happy, regardless of what happened?
​Despite what fight, what argument, what tragedies, whatever anything may happen in it,
what if I knew that there is me in the future who is happy with this marriage?

This is different from knowing whether I'm going to live in this specific house with her, or what job I'm going to have.
Those things are legit unknown and it's good for hypothesizing to inspire or whatever, but it presupposes something;
that that thing is required for your happiness. Like, it's great to dream about working at a dream job.
But the more I dream about it, the more my happiness gets tied to that specific job. You know what I'm saying?

I didn't know I was going to have done my Buddhist practice every day for 1000 days.
But I did know, for sure, that there was a version of me in the future who was unconditionally happy.
Happy while doing the most difficult things, like waking up super early and doing something I didn't want to do every day.
And that belief had the interesting effect of making me happy today, although I believed in the future.

This is the magic of knowing yourself in the future in terms of an internal state.
Most spend their entire life never having thought about anything related to this.
But my coaching practice tells me that this is the single most important motivator for change.
Once clients see this future self, they have a never-seen-before motivation and inspiration because it comes from themselves.

Let's study this timeline together on Saturday at 8AM Pacific time.
It's a free seminar open to anyone and I'd love for you to join. You can register here.