Hello Dear Friend,

Welcome to the Sunday edition of the Things I Wish I Knew Earlier (TIWIKE) Newsletter!

Here are three long-term strategies to make the future better for you to ponder in the coming week.

TIWIKE #1: Avoid rigor mortis of the personality

“Life is a lively process of becoming. If you haven’t added to your interests in the past year; if you are thinking the same thoughts, relating the same personal experiences, having the same predictable reactions—rigor mortis of the personality has set in.” General Douglas MacArthur

I remember attending a wedding once where I ran into a young lady with whom I graduated from high school.

At that time, we had been in the real world for more than ten years. I hadn’t seen her since graduation. We were exchanging the normal pleasantries, and I said something off the cuff, like “Yeah, I’m a completely different person than the guy you knew in high school.”

Her response surprised me.

She said, “Really? I guess I’m basically the same person.”

I was stunned. How could that be true? What had she been doing all those years? The quote from General MacArthur helped me understand.

Rigor mortis of the personality had set in, as it does for so many.

She was living in the same place we grew up, hanging around the same people, doing the same things. She hadn’t added to her interests. She was still thinking the same thoughts, relating the same personal experiences, and having the same predictable reactions.

My favorite part of the quote is the very first sentence.

Life indeed is a lively process of becoming.

We are not now who we once were, no matter how much we wish it were so. And we will not be in the future what we are now. That is our gift and our curse.

The question is what we are going to do with this becoming nature of ours.

Are we going to stick our heads in the sand and cling to the past or are we going to decide who we want to be in the future and chart a course to get there?

The first long-term strategy to make the future better is to avoid rigor mortis of the personality.

TIWIKE #2: The best way to progress is to persist in trying to adapt the world to your vision

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” George Bernard Shaw, ​Maxims for Revolutionists​

The best exemplar of this strategy is Steve Jobs, who left us a similar sentiment in the now-famous Think Different Apple ad campaign in 1997, which you can watch below.

The ad says, “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”

Jobs entered a world where there was next to no access to information. He envisioned a future where every person in the world would have access to all the information on the internet from a device in their pocket. The best proof that G. B. Shaw’s quote is true is that we presently live in the future that Jobs envisioned all those decades ago.

When we are out of alignment with the world in the present, we only have two options to achieve harmony in the future.

We can either change ourselves or we can change the world.

The reasonable choice is to change ourselves. The task is certainly much easier. But all that does is propagate the status quo.

What can we do when the status quo sucks?

We can conform to reality as it is, no matter how much we hate it. We can shut our mouths and lower our eyes and do as we are told. We can try not to ruffle any feathers.

Or we can do something about it.

We can point out all the ways the current arrangement of reality is insufficient.

We can envision a future that is different in all the right ways. We can build plans that contain strategies that usher us toward that better future. If our strategies work, and if we put enough energy into implementing them, then the world will conform to our wishes.

Isn’t that the strangest thing, that we have the power to shape the future?

To me, the only thing stranger than that is that so few choose to use it.

The second long-term strategy to make the future better is to persist in trying to adapt the world to your vision of what it could be rather than adapting yourself to the world as it is.

TIWIKE #3: Generosity in the present is the best strategy for making the future better

I have noticed something over time that wasn’t obvious to me as a younger man.

The people whom I observed operate from a place of generosity-who went out of their way to help others; who inconvenienced themselves when that was the right thing to do for someone else; who allowed, even encouraged, others to get the better end of negotiations on trivial matters-enjoyed an upward trajectory in their quality of life.

The people who operated from a place of selfishness experienced the opposite trajectory: their quality of life deteriorated over time.

Many of them ended up in prison or dead.

None of them landed in lucrative professions they loved. None of them established healthy marriages. None of them became excellent parents.

I knew a guy once that ALWAYS had to come out on the better side of every exchange.

If he paid for lunch last time, he would make sure you paid next time for a much more expensive meal. If he paid for gas on one trip, he would make sure you paid for gas on a longer trip. He even wanted you to pay for the condiments.

He never did anything out of the kindness of his heart.

He never did anything simply because it was the best thing to do for the other person.

He was a taker. And I watched his life fall apart over a period of years. He went from being a young man with promise to a drug-addled, friendless, wraith of a man, floating from relationship to relationship taking and taking until he got cut off.

I knew another guy who took the opposite path.

He has always been, some would say, overly generous with his time and money.

He never let friends go without when he had more than he could use. He never let friends struggle when he could give them opportunities. He always went out of his way to do everything he could to help everyone around him.

And guess what?

His life has gotten better by the year.

At this time, he is at the head of a rapidly growing company, recently married, and even more recently a new father. Unlike the guy from the first story, we are still friends to this day. And he deserves all the success he is enjoying.

The greatest irony about selfishness is that it doesn’t work.

The goal of selfishness is to get ahead at the expense of others.

Which may work in the short term, but I can promise it does not work at all in the long-term. This is true for many reasons, too many to include in a short, weekly newsletter. The foremost of them is that our relationships are our greatest assets.

Selfishness severs relationships over time.

People don’t want to be around others who always take from them.

Relationships are our greatest assets because they are portals to opportunity. If you focus on serving those around you in whatever capacity you’re able, then you will grow your relationship inventory. You will deepen existing relationships. And you will get access to more and more opportunities over time.

The third, and greatest, long-term strategy to make the future better is generosity in the present.

Question for the Week

How can you implement one or more of these strategies in the coming week?